Maybe irrelevant but FWIW, OpenBSD rewrote the "file" command from scratch to be more secure. I don't know how far that goes (like in the article "magic number

Maybe irrelevant but FWIW, OpenBSD rewrote the "file" command from scratch to be more secure. I don't know how far that goes (like in the article "magic numbers" section discussing polyglot files, for example), but they have had success making other things more secure (ssh, cvs, smtp, ntp, ...). Maybe they just made "file" less likely to have bugs discovered in the future.