7. Security Considerations

7. Security Considerations

The security considerations of [RFC7049] apply; special attention is drawn to the second paragraph of Section 8 of [RFC7049].

The tag for homogeneous arrays makes a promise about its tagged data item, which a maliciously constructed CBOR input can then choose to ignore. As always, the decoder therefore has to ensure that it is not driven into an undefined state by array elements that do not fulfill the promise, and that it does continue to fulfill its API contract in this case as well.

As with all formats that are used for data interchange, an attacker may have control over the shape of the data delivered as input to the application, which therefore needs to validate that shape before it makes it the basis of its further processing. One unique aspect that typed arrays add to this is that an attacker might substitute a Uint8ClampedArray for where the application expects a Uint8Array, or vice versa, potentially leading to very different (and unexpected) processing semantics of the in-memory data structures constructed. Applications that could be affected by this will therefore need to be careful about making this distinction in their input validation.