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7. Security Considerations

7.1. Reliability and Consistency

The reliability of URIs depends on the intent and implementation of the resource owner.

7.2. Malicious Construction

Attackers may construct malicious URIs to:

  • Exploit parser vulnerabilities
  • Bypass security checks
  • Execute injection attacks

7.3. Back-End Transcoding

Character encoding conversions may introduce security vulnerabilities.

7.4. Rare IP Address Formats

Certain IP address formats may be used for spoofing.

7.5. Sensitive Information

Warning: Do not include sensitive information (such as passwords) in URIs, because:

  • URIs may be logged
  • URIs may appear in referrer headers
  • URIs may be cached

7.6. Semantic Attacks

Visually similar characters may be used to deceive users.

Examples:

  • Cyrillic "а" looks like Latin "a"
  • example.com vs examp1e.com (l vs 1)

Next Chapter: 8. IANA Considerations - URI scheme registration