Canonicalization Failures as a Recurring Vulnerability Class: Representation Divergence in Cryptographic Systems and Its Avoidance

arXiv:2608.06508 · cs.CR · Submitted 2026-08-06 · Read on arXiv

Arslan Brömme

cs.CR

Submitted: 2026-08-06

Updated: 2026-08-10

Comments: 33 pages, 1 figure, 4 tables

Code: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Composition — 15× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Verification — 14× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Decoder — 12× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Decode — 6× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Editor — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Binary Canonical Serialization — 2× in this paper
• Concise Binary Object Representation — 1× in this paper
• Distinguished Encoding Rules — 1× in this paper
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Algorithmically Presented Numbers and Canonical Representations in Cryptographic Protocols
• Git Hash Chain Malleability
• Five Attacks on x402 Agentic Payment Protocol
• Secure Parsing and Serializing with Separation Logic Applied to CBOR, CDDL, and COSE

Related papers

• SoK: AI-Augmented Binary Reversing
• Relaxed Sender Anonymity for CBDC Interbank Settlement: A Zero-Knowledge Approach on Permissioned EVM
• Calibration-Family Overfit: Why Trusted Sabotage Monitors Don't Transfer Across Lineages
• Estimating the Social Cost of Corporate Data Breaches
• Efficient Fuzzy PSI under One-Sided Assumptions
• Sealing the Audit-Runtime Gap for LLM Skills