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Suppose, when you were registering your username `develatio`, you decided to put U+202E RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE in there as well. Now when somebody is reading this page and their browser gets to your username, it switches the text direction to render it right-to-left.


and "that's it"? I mean, it does sound like it might introduce unexpected UI behaviour, but are there any other more serious / dangerous consequences?


One of my pet peeves is when UIs don't clearly constrain and delineate the extent of user-controlled text. Plenty of phishing attacks have relied on having attacker-controlled input seem authoritative, e.g. getting gmail to repeat back something to the victim.


Making any page that mentions you – including admin pages that might be used to disable your account – become unreadable is bad enough.

Another comment linked to this:

https://trojansource.codes


RTL lets you obfuscate file extensions.

E.g. Annexe.txt (that you might assume would be safely opened by a text editor) could actually be Ann\u202Etxt.exe, a dangerous executable.


Yes, dangerous consequences of unexpected UI behaviour: imagine writing a URL backwards with a right-to-left override, and it clearly says www.yourbank.example but it goes to www.evilsite.example/example.yourbank.www




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