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Though it barely mentions security https://willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/ https://willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/ is one of my favorite essays to

Though it barely mentions security https://willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/ https://willcrichton.net/notes/portable-epubs/ is one of my favorite essays to be posted to HN in awhile https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39138042 I wonder how one would measure the costs and benefits (with a focus on security) of speeding up and making more security-driven the gargantuan task of shifting to a better, well, portable document format. People are thinking big and want measurement, eg just posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39514844 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39514844 WH release on memory safety https://www.whitehouse.gov/oncd/briefing-room/2024/02/26/press-release-technical-report/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/oncd/briefing-room/2024/02/26/pre... would it not make sense to be similarly ambitious and metrics-driven for this too?

nonrandomstring 3y ago
Lot of situations I use pdftotext file.pdf - | nroff | less pdftotext is from Poppler Developers http://poppler.freedesktop.org http://poppler.freedesktop.org Glyph & Cog, LLC nroff is a GNU common util on most linux/unix systems (though I don't trust poppler utils to be secure)
- mlinksva 3y ago
  Yeah, I wasn't referring to the security of tools used to process PDFs, including memory-safe rewrites, but that too! Instead to whether incentivizing migration to a safer portable document format couldn't be justified and done in a similar way to how memory safety is being approached now. Edit: re-reading I guess your point is that you can use tools to extract text from PDFs and then read without worry. That brings up another super annoying thing about PDFs--it's can be hard to extract text from them with high fidelity.
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    > can be hard to extract text from them with high fidelity. Or impossible with scans. Usually I take a look at the filesize as a guestimate. Anyone know better FOSS OCR tools that run from cmdline?
mdaniel 3y ago
The irony doesn't escape me that a link entitled "portable epubs" loads infinitely with the ... ahem, helpful ... text of "To work around the bug, you either need to close any other tabs of this document (in Google Chrome), or try a different browser." In practice, it's a simple JS kaboom that they didn't catch, because error handling is for n00bs
layer8 3y ago
PDFs aren’t a widespread malware vector in practice. Hence there is little pressure, and it’s much easier to enforce a profile like PDF/A than to migrate to a different document format.
- egberts1 3y ago
  * cough * cough * You can embed a port scanner in JavaScript inside a PDF document via /JavaScript tags. And many high-end IDS/IPS/NDS/XNS firewalls look into PDF documents for such things like that. https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/library/samples/Samples_JavaScript.html https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/library/sam...
  - layer8 3y ago
    There is no contradiction to what I wrote.

nonrandomstring 3y ago

Lot of situations I use pdftotext file.pdf - | nroff | less pdftotext is from Poppler Developers http://poppler.freedesktop.org http://poppler.freedesktop.org Glyph & Cog, LLC nroff is a GNU common util on most linux/unix systems (though I don't trust poppler utils to be secure)

mlinksva 3y ago
Yeah, I wasn't referring to the security of tools used to process PDFs, including memory-safe rewrites, but that too! Instead to whether incentivizing migration to a safer portable document format couldn't be justified and done in a similar way to how memory safety is being approached now. Edit: re-reading I guess your point is that you can use tools to extract text from PDFs and then read without worry. That brings up another super annoying thing about PDFs--it's can be hard to extract text from them with high fidelity.
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > can be hard to extract text from them with high fidelity. Or impossible with scans. Usually I take a look at the filesize as a guestimate. Anyone know better FOSS OCR tools that run from cmdline?

mdaniel 3y ago

The irony doesn't escape me that a link entitled "portable epubs" loads infinitely with the ... ahem, helpful ... text of "To work around the bug, you either need to close any other tabs of this document (in Google Chrome), or try a different browser." In practice, it's a simple JS kaboom that they didn't catch, because error handling is for n00bs

layer8 3y ago

PDFs aren’t a widespread malware vector in practice. Hence there is little pressure, and it’s much easier to enforce a profile like PDF/A than to migrate to a different document format.

egberts1 3y ago
* cough * cough * You can embed a port scanner in JavaScript inside a PDF document via /JavaScript tags. And many high-end IDS/IPS/NDS/XNS firewalls look into PDF documents for such things like that. https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/library/samples/Samples_JavaScript.html https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/library/sam...
- layer8 3y ago
  There is no contradiction to what I wrote.