Exploring the Challenges of Multibyte Unicode Encoding

Episode 135: In this episode of Critical Thinking - Bug Bounty Podcast Justin sits down with Ryan Barnett for a deep dive on WAFs. We also recap his Exploiting Unicode Normalization talk from DEFCON, and get his perspective on bug hunting from his time at Akamai.

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Shoutout to YTCracker for the awesome intro music!

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Today’s Guest: https://x.com/ryancbarnett

====== Resources ======

Accidental Stored XSS Flaw in Zemanta 'Related Posts' Plugin for TypePad

https://webappdefender.blogspot.com/2013/04/accidental-stored-xss-flaw-in-zemanta.html

XSS Street-Fight

https://media.blackhat.com/bh-dc-11/Barnett/BlackHat_DC_2011_Barnett_XSS%20Streetfight-Slides.pdf

Blackhat USA 2025 - Lost in Translation: Exploiting Unicode Normalization

https://www.blackhat.com/us-25/briefings/schedule/#lost-in-translation-exploiting-unicode-normalization-44923

====== Timestamps ======

(00:00:00) Introduction

(00:02:49) Accidental Stored XSS in Typepad Plugin

(00:06:34) Chatscatter & Abusing third party Analytics

(00:11:42) Ryan Barnett Introduction

(00:21:11) Virtual Patching & WAF Challenges

(00:40:39) AWS API Gateways & Whitelisting Bug Hunter Traffic

(00:49:59) Lost in Translation: Exploiting Unicode Normalization

(01:11:29) CSPs at the WAF level & 'Bounties for Bypass'