[openssl-dev] PBE_UNICODE

[Andy Polyakov]

>> The way I read PKCS12 the string should be big-endian UTF-16 one.
> [...]
>> Correct procedure should be to convert it to wchar_t and
>> then ensure correct endianness.
> 
> Please note that wchar_t itself might not have any relation with
> UTF.  You should explictly convert from the locale charmap to
> UTF16-BE.

Right, it was kind of sloppy formulation.

> Depending on the OS, there are functions available to ask what the
> current encoding is and convert between encodings.

And question also is who should be responsible for the conversion. For
example in order to make it work you might have to mess up locale, and a
library in general is hardly the right place, and libcrypto in
particular is terrible place to do that. Nor does one want to create
dependency on library like iconv, not in libcrypto. In other words I'd
say that it's not unreasonable to specify which input do we expect in
libcrypto and put whole responsibility to ensure that input is right on
caller. Formally one can say nothing needs to be changed in libcrypto,
indeed there is _asc and _uni, i.e. ASCII and verbatim implying
big-endian UTF-16. Though this is not an excuse for not doing anything
about pkcs12 command-line utility... At the same time one can still
argue that since there is a convenience _asc interface, there ought to
be convenience utf8 one (and as already implied not dependent on current
locale?)...