---
title: Expressive Security
osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/conferences/seagl2021/program/proposals/826
beginning: '2021-11-06T15:30:00.000-07:00'
end: '2021-11-06T16:00:00.000-07:00'
resources:
  internet_archive_identifier: SeaGL2021-Katie_McLaughlin-Expressive_Security
  slides_url: https://glasnt.com/talks/expressive-security
presenters:
- name: Katie McLaughlin
  osem_url: https://osem.seagl.org/users/752
  gravatar_id: fb3e2d1700bfe111088261ed1613315d
  biography: |-
    Katie has worn many different hats over the years. She has been a software developer for many languages, systems administrator for multiple operating systems, and speaker on many different topics.

    When she's not changing the world, she enjoys making tapestries, cooking, and seeing just how well various application stacks handle emoji.
---

Emoji are an interesting beast. Once an obscure part of the Unicode standard, they are now so popular you can buy Emoji Poop Slippers (yes, I'm serious).

However, now that emoji are saturating our systems so, there are interesting side effects. Follow along as we discover how some systems do not like emoji, which systems can handle the odd non-standard character, and if we can find any security vulnerabilities only using the humble smiley-face.

In this talk, we will cover many aspects, including:

 * a short history of emoji
 * the year of emoji convergence
 * how to identify your operating system based on how emoji appear
 * how one WordPress fix saved a quarter of the internet from XSS through emoji

By the end of this talk, you will appreciate how complex human expression is, and why ensuring unicode compatibility will help your systems.
