At a high-level Unicode-related security bugs can be categorized into the following root-causes:

Canonicalization

• Interpreting non-shortest form (e.g .UTF-8 encoding trickery)
• Other decoding issues

Absorption (over-consumption)

• Over-consuming invalid byte sequences or correcting rather than failing
• When <41 C2 C3 B1 42>  becomes <41 42>

Character deletion and swallowing

• “deletion of noncharacters” (UTR-36)
• <scr[U+FEFF]ipt> becomes <script>
• Use replacement characters instead!

Interpreting Syntax replacements

• white space and line feeds
• E.g. when U+180E acts like U+0020

Best-fit mappings

• When σ becomes s
• When ′ becomes ‘

Buffer overruns

• Incorrect assumptions about string sizes (chars vs. bytes)
• Improper width calculations

Timing issues

• handling Unicode after security gates
• Sometimes handling Unicode before a gate can be a problem too! E.g. BOM handling