4 ms·
Went over a few of these with a pretty keen eye, and they aren't that particularly interesting. The Docker one is just a weird bug, it's not a vulnerability, an
by dvt 3mo ago
Went over a few of these with a pretty keen eye, and they aren't that particularly interesting. The Docker one is just a weird bug, it's not a vulnerability, and certainly not a "0-day" (which is a pretty loaded term and people expect bad stuff to happen).
The nghttp2 nghttpx one is more interesting, and could potentially be used for phishing, but it's very hard to line up properly because the request queue is non-deterministic so basically impossible to target a specific victim (assuming proxy traffic).
The VLC one is just a straight-up crash/bug. And VLC crashes all the time when using weird codecs, so that's nothing new.
Am I missing something here?
- jeffbee 3mo agoI mean, that's how people get hacked. If vlc crashed on my computer, and every day I should raise thanks to my gods that I do not use vlc, I would immediately unplug it and thoughtfully consider the circumstances under which it would be safe to turn it back on.
- TheTon 3mo agoRight, this is why video parse / decode ought to be sandboxed. Writing secure code for these formats, especially in C, is really hard. I just sort of glanced at the bug in the repo, but it sounds plausible. It certainly wouldn’t be the first of its kind.
- tormeh 3mo agoAnd it's my impression the code is often in assembly, which is even less structured.
- Wowfunhappy 3mo ago> I mean, that's how people get hacked. ...when was the last documented case of an in-the-wild hack targeting VNC?
- ZeWaka 3mo agoVLC != VNC
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- Wowfunhappy 3mo agoOops! I was on my phone. I meant VLC.
- commandersaki 3mo agoI'm guessing none to be honest. It sounds plausible but in practice it's probably too difficult to do anything useful compared to other tried and true vectors. Everyone goes to the extremes when it comes to these theories and throws out all aspects of pragmatism.
- d-cc 3mo ago>I mean, that's how people get hacked. If vlc crashed on my computer, and every day I should raise thanks to my gods that I do not use vlc, I would immediately unplug it and thoughtfully consider the circumstances under which it would be safe to turn it back on. What are you doing on your computer where it is really a threat to you? I'm curious as to your specific use case :)
- zahlman 3mo agoDo you feel the same way about seeing "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" in the terminal from some other arbitrary program? If not, why not?
- iamnothere 3mo agoBecause people often use VLC to view untrusted content. Video is a great vector for distributing malware, especially sought-after grey area content like porn, conflict videos, celebrity leaks, pirated films, etc. Not enough people pay attention to the impact of video as a vector for compromise. All downloaded video should be sandboxed!
- commandersaki 3mo agoHow many victims are known to be exploited by video codecs? Compare that with the wider landscape of how victims are being exploited.
- iamnothere 3mo agoCodec vulnerabilities in the browser have been a recurring source of exploits, as have similar vulnerabilities in phone messenger apps. The phone ones are particularly bad because phones typically preprocess received media files (for thumbnailing etc) so a vulnerability here can sometimes be chained into a remotely triggered near-instant compromise. I don’t know if there is data on exploits due to downloaded media but it would be an easy way to exploit specific target populations (find a video of interest to them and “leak” it somewhere).
- commandersaki 3mo agoIf said videos or media are doing that, there would be a corpus of samples by now. I'm very sceptical of this.
- iamnothere 3mo ago