5 ms·

If there are so many vulnerabilities, should not they change approach to development, for example, use memory-safe languages, static analysis, do not use dubiou

If there are so many vulnerabilities, should not they change approach to development, for example, use memory-safe languages, static analysis, do not use dubious "hacks" that break it?

cryo32 3mo ago
No. They tried that with coreutils and look what happened. More CVEs. 99% of what I throw though ffmpeg is trusted i.e. I created it. It’s not a major risk.
- codedokode 3mo ago
  In case with coreutils, as I remember, there were mostly race conditions. Not memory safety issues. Maybe we just need better I/O libraries.
  - uecker 3mo ago
    Or use a buffer abstraction in C. This is not exactly rocket science. The "this is impossible to prevent in C" nonsense does far more harm than good.
    - codedokode 3mo ago
      To be fair, C is a pain to use, so it is better to improve Rust. It is annoying when for example, you have to free several allocated structures when there is an error in the middle of a functon.
      - uecker 3mo ago
        I personally like to use C and find Rust annoyingly complex. I think it may be an alternative to C++, but C++ is also too complex for my taste. I do not find it annoying to free several allocated structures when there is an error, but one could also automate this with a often used extension. There is also the question whether trading memory safety against supply chain risks is really worth it.
    - shermantanktop 3mo ago
      Errors are easily found and corrected for a modest one-person project in C. But we’re combining probability of error creation (which is effectively constant) and the limits of human cognition. Some things are impossible at one scale, become possible at another, and become inevitable at yet another.
- acdha 3mo ago
  coreutils was a category error: they took a set of tools which were not very exposed to memory safety errors and rewrote them in a language which does nothing to prevent the kind of logic errors coreutils has suffered from (mostly races around file operations). It’s like complaining that an airbag didn’t save you after driving into a lake. In contrast, ffmpeg is exactly the sweet spot for a memory-safe language with those complex decoders operating on data which is often untrusted. I wouldn’t suggest a project of that scale lightly but it’s at least a near-perfect fit on the problem domain.
  - krageon 3mo ago
    The coreutils rewrite was shit because of the license change. Most of the other founding ideas were also bad as you say, but the license change was absolutely a much worse signal. Just a bunch of people rolling over and showing big corps their belly. And for what? So they can be more exploited by people that treat them like cattle.
  - anoneng 3mo ago
    I would say it’s the opposite. coreutils is core utils, you cannot write shell scripts without them, they are widely and almost unavoidably used in trusted environments. They are also relatively simple. With ffmpeg, anyone who knows anything about secure application development in the past 20 years knows that it is a huge security tarpit and throwing it untrusted inputs in trusted environment is asking to be owned. You thoroughly sandbox that shit. That’s true for all untrusted media conversion, but absolutely with ffmpeg.
    - zahlman 3mo ago
      > you cannot write shell scripts without them, they are widely and almost unavoidably used in trusted environments. True. That doesn't make them "very exposed to memory safety errors".
    - acdha 3mo ago
      My point about coreutils was that they’re rarely used in situations where an attacker can provide arbitrary input - it’s more like race conditions with code already running on the same system trying to escalate access – so what you need to protect against are things like race conditions around file operations or symlink safety.
ivanjermakov 3mo ago
Memory safety and critical performance rarely go together. Big chunk of FFmpeg is written in assembly to sqweeze most hardware performance. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140614
- IshKebab 3mo ago
  Sure but it seems like most of these vulnerabilities are being found in the C code.
  - bybrooklyn 3mo ago
    Rust could help with this!
- leonidasrup 3mo ago
  It would be interesting to see the results from a fuzzer, developed for FFmpeg style assembly code.

If there are so many vulnerabilities, should not they change approach to development, for example, use memory-safe languages, static analysis, do not use dubious "hacks" that break it?

cryo32 3mo ago

No. They tried that with coreutils and look what happened. More CVEs. 99% of what I throw though ffmpeg is trusted i.e. I created it. It’s not a major risk.

codedokode 3mo ago
In case with coreutils, as I remember, there were mostly race conditions. Not memory safety issues. Maybe we just need better I/O libraries.
- uecker 3mo ago
  Or use a buffer abstraction in C. This is not exactly rocket science. The "this is impossible to prevent in C" nonsense does far more harm than good.
  - codedokode 3mo ago
    To be fair, C is a pain to use, so it is better to improve Rust. It is annoying when for example, you have to free several allocated structures when there is an error in the middle of a functon.
    - uecker 3mo ago
      I personally like to use C and find Rust annoyingly complex. I think it may be an alternative to C++, but C++ is also too complex for my taste. I do not find it annoying to free several allocated structures when there is an error, but one could also automate this with a often used extension. There is also the question whether trading memory safety against supply chain risks is really worth it.
  - shermantanktop 3mo ago
    Errors are easily found and corrected for a modest one-person project in C. But we’re combining probability of error creation (which is effectively constant) and the limits of human cognition. Some things are impossible at one scale, become possible at another, and become inevitable at yet another.
acdha 3mo ago
coreutils was a category error: they took a set of tools which were not very exposed to memory safety errors and rewrote them in a language which does nothing to prevent the kind of logic errors coreutils has suffered from (mostly races around file operations). It’s like complaining that an airbag didn’t save you after driving into a lake. In contrast, ffmpeg is exactly the sweet spot for a memory-safe language with those complex decoders operating on data which is often untrusted. I wouldn’t suggest a project of that scale lightly but it’s at least a near-perfect fit on the problem domain.
- krageon 3mo ago
  The coreutils rewrite was shit because of the license change. Most of the other founding ideas were also bad as you say, but the license change was absolutely a much worse signal. Just a bunch of people rolling over and showing big corps their belly. And for what? So they can be more exploited by people that treat them like cattle.
- anoneng 3mo ago
  I would say it’s the opposite. coreutils is core utils, you cannot write shell scripts without them, they are widely and almost unavoidably used in trusted environments. They are also relatively simple. With ffmpeg, anyone who knows anything about secure application development in the past 20 years knows that it is a huge security tarpit and throwing it untrusted inputs in trusted environment is asking to be owned. You thoroughly sandbox that shit. That’s true for all untrusted media conversion, but absolutely with ffmpeg.
  - zahlman 3mo ago
    > you cannot write shell scripts without them, they are widely and almost unavoidably used in trusted environments. True. That doesn't make them "very exposed to memory safety errors".
  - acdha 3mo ago
    My point about coreutils was that they’re rarely used in situations where an attacker can provide arbitrary input - it’s more like race conditions with code already running on the same system trying to escalate access – so what you need to protect against are things like race conditions around file operations or symlink safety.

ivanjermakov 3mo ago

Memory safety and critical performance rarely go together. Big chunk of FFmpeg is written in assembly to sqweeze most hardware performance. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140614 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43140614

IshKebab 3mo ago
Sure but it seems like most of these vulnerabilities are being found in the C code.
- bybrooklyn 3mo ago
  Rust could help with this!
leonidasrup 3mo ago
It would be interesting to see the results from a fuzzer, developed for FFmpeg style assembly code.