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Interesting topic, but I'm not opening a PDF from some random website. Post a summary of the paper or the key findings here first.
by woeirua 1y ago
Interesting topic, but I'm not opening a PDF from some random website. Post a summary of the paper or the key findings here first.
- BoredPositron 1y agoIt's hacker news. You can handle a PDF.
- jeffbee 1y agoI approve of this level of paranoia, but I would just like to know why PDFs are dangerous (reasonable) but HTML is not (inconsistent).
- HeatrayEnjoyer 1y agoPDFs can run almost anything and have an attack surface the size of Greece's coast.
- zamadatix 1y agoThat's not very different than web browsers, but usually security concerned people just disable scripting functionality and such in their viewer (browser, pdf reader, rtf viewer, etc) instead of focusing on the file extension it comes in. I think pdf.js even defaults to not running scripts in PDFs by default (would need to double check), if you want to view it in the browser's sandbox. Of course there's still always text rendering based security attacks and such but, again, there's nothing unique to that vs a webpage in a browser.