Re: Issues with £ character in passwords

[Stefan Paetow]

> In ISO/IEC 8859-1 (latin-1), £ is 0xa3, in UTF8 it's a two byte encoding 0xc2 0xa3. Same issue 
> with § (0xa7) which will become 0xc2 0xa7 in UTF8.

I meant to reply to this earlier. The UTF8 encoding also means that when it is converted to ASCII from its raw byte state, this is the result:

0xc2 0xa7 = £ 

That's why adding the  to the front of the pound sign will make it generate the correct hash for the password.

Unfortunately, in a previous life, we had lots of fun with this on Windows after passwords stored in the registry and in INI files (in ANSI/ASCII format) caused lots of issues when read into a UTF-8 stream without proper conversion (where it was assumed that all the standard ASCII characters when encountered would directly translate to UTF-8, which they of course don't).

:-/

Stefan Paetow
Moonshot Industry & Research Liaison Coordinator

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