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> There is a class of crypto implementation bugs that arises from how you feed data to your MAC, so, if you're designing a new system from scratch, Google "crypto canonicalization bugs".

I get a whole bunch of links about javax.xml.crypto.dsig throwing exceptions, which wasn't terribly illuminating.

I think the reference is to the bugs discussed on page 21 here: http://www.contextis.com/documents/33/Exploiting_XML_Digital... but I'm not sure.




It boils down to this:

Make sure the data fed to your MAC is unambiguous. Or rather, make sure the data fed to your MAC is done in such a way that you cannot have different messages appear the same to the MAC encoder.

For instance, say you sort and concatenate your options without a delimiter. Then ["ab", "cd"] will have the same MAC as ["a", "bcd"], as in both cases the actual data fed to the MAC will be "abcd". This is a very bad thing.





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