On the other hand as an ffmpeg user do you care? Are you okay not being told a tool you're using has a vulnerability in it because the devs don't have time to fix it? I mean someone could already be using the vulnerability regardless of what Google does.
>Are you okay not being told a tool you're using has a vulnerability in it because the devs don't have time to fix it?
Yes? It's in the license
>NO WARRANTY
>15. BECAUSE THE LIBRARY IS LICENSED FREE OF CHARGE, THERE IS NO
WARRANTY FOR THE LIBRARY, TO THE EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW.
EXCEPT WHEN OTHERWISE STATED IN WRITING THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND/OR
OTHER PARTIES PROVIDE THE LIBRARY "AS IS" WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE
IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR
PURPOSE.
If I really care, I can submit a patch or pay someone to. The ffmpeg devs don't owe me anything.
Not being told the existence of bugs is different from having a warranty on software. How would you submit a patch on a bug you were not aware of?
Google should provide a fix but it's been standard to disclose a bug after a fixed time because the lack of disclosure doesn't remove the existence of the bug. This might have to be rethought in the context of OSS bugs but an MIT license shouldn't mean other people can't disclose bugs in my project.
Google publicly disclosing the bug doesn't only let affected users know. It also lets attackers know how they can exploit the software.
Holding public disclosure over the heads of maintainers if they don't act fast enough is damaging not only to the project, but to end users themselves also. There was no pressing need to publicly disclose this 25 year old bug.
How is having a disclosure policy so that you balance the tradeoffs between informing people and leaving a bug unreported "holding" anything over the heads of the maintainers? They could just file public bug reports from the beginning. There's no requirement that they file non-public reports first, and certainly not everyone who does file a bug report is going to do so privately. If this is such a minuscule bug, then whether it's public or not doesn't matter. And if it's not a minuscule bug, then certainly giving some private period, but then also making a public disclosure is the only responsible thing to do.
That license also doesn't give the ffmpeg devs the right to dictate which bugs you're allowed to find, disclose privately, or disclose publicly. The software is provided as-is, without warranty, and I can do what I want with it, including reporting bugs. The ffmpeg devs can simply not read the bug reports, if they hate bug reports so much.
Sorry to put it this bluntly, but you are not going to get what you want unless you do it yourself or you can convince, pay, browbeat, or threaten somebody to provide it for you.
Have you ever used a piece of software that DID make guarantees about being safe?
Every software I've ever used had a "NO WARRANTY" clause of some kind in the license. Whether an open-source license or a EULA. Every single one. Except, perhaps, for public-domain software that explicitly had no license, but even "licenses" like CC0 explicitly include "Affirmer offers the Work as-is and makes no representations or warranties of any kind concerning the Work ..."
I don't know what our contract terms were for security issues, but I've certainly worked on a product where we had 5 figure penalties for any processing errors or any failures of our system to perform its actions by certain times of day. You can absolutely have these things in a contract if you pay for it, and mass market software that you pay for likely also has some implied merchantability depending on jurisdiction.
But yes things you get for free have no guarantees and there should be no expectations put in the gift giver beyond not being actively intentionally malicious.
Point. As part of a negotiated contract, some companies might indeed put in guarantees of software quality; I've never worked in the nuclear industry or any other industries where that would be required, so my perspective was a little skewed. But all mass-distributed software I've ever seen or heard of, free or not, has that "no warranty" clause, and only individual contracts are exceptions.
Also, "depending on jurisdiction" is a good point as well. I'd forgotten how often I've seen things like "Offer not valid in the state of Delaware/California/wherever" or "If you live in Tennessee, this part of the contract is preempted by state law". (All states here are pulled out of a hat and used for examples only, I'm not thinking of any real laws).
This program discloses security issues to the projects and only discloses them after they have had a "reasonable" chance to fix it though, and projects can request extensions before disclosure if projects plan to fix it but need more time.
Google runs this security program even on libraries they do not use at all, where it's not a demand, it's just whitehat security auditing. I don't see the meaningful difference between Google doing it and some guy with a blog doing it here.
Great, so Google is actively spending money on making open source projects better and more secure. And for some reason everyone is now mad at them for it because they didn't also spend additional money making patches themselves. We can absolutely wish and ask that they spend some money and resources on making those patches, but this whole thing feels like the message most corporations are going to take is "don't do anything to contribute to open source projects at all, because if you don't do it just right, they're going to drag you through the mud for it" rather than "submit more patches"
Why should Google not be expected to also contribute fixes to a core dependency of their browser, or to help funding the developers? Just publishing bug reports by themselves does not make open source projects secure!
It doesn't if you report lots of "security" issues (like this 25 years old bug) and give too little time to fix them.
Nobody is against Google reporting bugs, but they use automatic AI to spam them and then expect a prompt fix. If you can't expect the maintainers to fix the bug before disclosure, then it is a balancing act: Is the bug serious enough that users must be warned and avoid using the software? Will disclosing the bug now allow attackers to exploit it because no fix has been made?
In this case, this bug (imo) is not serious enough to warrant a short disclosure time, especially if you consider *other* security notices that may have a bigger impact. The chances of an attacker finding this on their own and exploiting it are low, but now everybody is aware and you have to rush to update.
> This is a bug in the default config that is likely to result in RCE, it doesn’t get that much worse than this.
Likely to get RCE? No. Not every UAF results in a RCE. Also, someone would have to find this and it's clearly not something you can easily spot from the code.
Google did extensive fuzzing to discover it.
The trade off is that Ffmpeg had to divert resources to fix this, when the chance it would have been discovered independently is tiny, and exploited even tinier.
The bug exists whether or not google publishes a public bug report. They are no more making the project less secure than if some retro-game enthusiast had found the same bug and made a blog post about it.
Publishing bugs that the project has so that they can be fixed is actively making the project more secure. How is someone going to do anything about it if Google didn’t do the research?
Did you see how the FFMPEG project patched a bug for a 1995 console? That's not a good use for the limited amount of volunteers on the project. It actively makes it less secure by taking away from more pertinent bugs.
The codec can be triggered to run automatically by adversarial input. The irrelevance of the format is itself irrelevant when ffmpeg has it on by default.
Publicizing vulnerabilities is the problem though. Google is ensuring obscure or unknown vulnerabilities will now be very well known and very public.
This is significant when they represent one of the few entities on the planet likely able to find bugs at that scale due to their wealth.
So funding a swarm of bug reports, for software they benefit from, using a scale of resources not commonly available, while not contributing fixes and instead demanding timelines for disclosure, seems a lot more like they'd just like to drive people out of open source.
I think most people learned about this bug from FFmpeg's actions, not Google's. Also, you are underestimating adversaries: Google spends quite a bit of money on this, but not a lot given their revenue, because their primary purpose is not finding security bugs. There are entities that are smaller than Google but derive almost all their money from finding exploits. Their results are broadly comparable but they are only publicized when they mess up.
> so Google is actively spending money on making open source projects better and more secure
It looks like they are now starting to flood OSS with issues because "our AI tools are great", but don't want to spend a dime helping to fix those issues.
According to the ffmpeg maintainer's own website (fflabs.eu) Google is spending plenty of dimes helping to fix issues in ffmpeg. Certainly they're spending enough dimes for the maintainers to proudly display Google's logo on their site as a customer of theirs.
Yes and if you look on ffmpeg’s site you’ll find a link where they promote hiring their devs independently as consultants for ffmpeg work. Note the names of those maintainers. Now go to fflabs.eu, observe that they are an ffmpeg consulting firm, scroll down on the main page and observe the Google logo among their promoted list of customers. Now click on the “team” link and check out the names of the people that run fflabs. Notice that they are some of the very same people listed in the ffmpeg main site. Ergo Google pays ffmpeg developers to work on ffmpeg.
> Note the names of those maintainers. Now go to fflabs.eu
> Now click on the “team” link and check out the names
Quite an investigative work you've done there: some maintainers may do some work that surely... means sonething?
Meanwhile actual maintainer actually patching thousands of vulnerabilities in ffmpeg, including the recent ones reported by Google:
--- start quote ---
so far i got 7560€ before taxes for my security work in the last 7 months. And thats why i would appreciate that google, facebook, amazon and others would pay me directly. Also that 7560 i only got after the twitter noise.
The user is vulnerable while the problem is unfixed. Google publishing a vulnerability doesn't change the existence of the vulnerability. If Google can find it, so can others.
Making the vulnerability public makes it easy to find to exploit, but it also makes it easy to find to fix.
If it is so easy to fix, then why doesn't Google fix it? So far they've spent more effort in spreading knowledge about the vulnerability than fixing it, so I don't agree with your assessment that Google is not actively making the world worse here.
I didn't say it was easy to fix. I said a publication made it easy to find it, if someone wanted to fix something.
If you want to fix up old codecs in ffmpeg for fun, would you rather have a list of known broken codecs and what they're doing wrong; or would you rather have to find a broken codec first.
What a strange sentence. Google can do a lot of things that nobody can do. The list of things that only Google, a handful of nation states, and a handful of Google-peers can do is probably even longer.
Sure, but running a fuzzer on ancient codecs isn't that special. I can't do it, but if I wanted to learn how, codecs would be a great place to start. (in fact, Google did some of their early fuzzing work in 2012-2014 on ffmpeg [1]) Media decoders have been the vector for how many zero interaction, high profile attacks lately? Media decoders were how many of the Macromedia Flash vulnerabilities? Codecs that haven't gotten any new media in decades but are enabled in default builds are a very good place to go looking for issues.
Google does have immense scale that makes some things easier. They can test and develop congestion control algorithms with world wide (ex-China) coverage. Only a handful of companies can do that; nation states probably can't. Google isn't all powerful either, they can't make Android updates really work even though it might be useful for them.
you'd assume that a bad actor would have found the exploit and kept it hidden for their own use. To assume otherwise is fundamentally flawed security practice.
which bad actors would have more of, as they'd have a financial incentive to make use of the found vulnerabilities. White hats don't get anything in return (financially) - it's essentially charity work.
In this world and the alternate universe both, attackers can also use _un_published vulnerabilities because they have high incentive to do research. Keeping a bug secret does not prevent it from existing or from being exploited.
As clearly stated, most users of ffmpeg are unaware of them using it. Even them knowing about a vulnerability in ffmpeg, they wouldn't know they are affected.
Really, the burden is on those shipping products that depend on ffmpeg: they are the ones who have to fix the security issues for their customers. If Google is one of those companies, they should provide the fix in the given time.
But how are those companies supposed to know they need to do anything unless someone finds and publicly reports the issue in the first place? Surely we're not advocating for a world where every vendor downstream of the ffmpeg project independently discovers and patches security vulnerabilities without ever reporting the issues upstream right?
If they both funded vulnerability scanning and vulnerability fixing (if they don't want to do it in-house, they can sponsor the upstream team), which is to me the obvious "how", I am not sure why you believe there is only one way to do it.
It's about accountability! Who really gets to do it once those who ship it to customers care, is on them to figure out (though note that maintainers will have some burden to review, integrate and maintain the change anyway).
They regularly submit code and they buy consulting from the ffmpeg maintainers according to the maintainer's own website. It seems to me like they're already funding fixes in ffmpeg, and really everyone is just mad that this particular issue didn't come with a fix. Which is honestly not a great look for convincing corporations to invest resources into contributing to upstream. If regular patches and buying dev time from the maintainers isn't enough to avoid getting grief for "not contributing" then why bother spending that time and money in the first place?
I have about 100x as much sympathy for an open source project getting time to fix a security bug than I do a multibillion dollar company with nearly infinite resources essentially blackmailing a small team of developers like this. They could -easily- pay a dev to fix the bug and send the fix to ffmpeg.
Since when are bug reports blackmail? If some retro game enthusiast discovered this bug and made a blog post about it that went to the front page of HN, is that blackmail? If someone running a fuzzer found this bug and dumped a public bug report into github is that blackmail? What if google made this report privately, but didn't say anything about when they would make it public and then just went public at some arbitrary time in the future? How is "heads up, here's a bug we found, here's the reproduction steps for it, we'll file a public bug report on it soon" blackmail?
In my case, yes, but my pipeline is closed. Processes run on isolated instances that are terminated without haste as soon as workflow ends. Even if uncaught fatal errors occur, janitor scripts run to ensure instances are terminated on a fast schedule. This isn't something running on my personal device with random content that was provided by unknown someone on the interwebs.
So while this might be a high security risk because it possibly could allow RCE, the real-world risk is very low.
> On the other hand as an ffmpeg user do you care? Are you okay not being told a tool you're using has a vulnerability in it because the devs don't have time to fix it?
Yes, because publicly disclosing the vulnerability means someone will have enough information to exploit it. Without public disclosure, the chance of that is much lower.
Public disclosures also means users will know about it and distros can turn off said codec downstream. It's not that hard lol. Information is always better. You may also get third-party contributors who will then be motivated to fix the issue. If no one signs up to do so, maybe this codec should just be permanently shelved.
Note that ffmpeg doesn't want to remove the codec because their goal is to play every format known to man, but that's their goal. No one forces them to keep all codecs working.
Let's say that FFMPEG has a 10 CVE where a very easy stream can cause it to RCE. So what?
We are talking about software commonly for end users deployed to encode their own media. Something that rarely comes in untrusted forms. For an exploit to happen, you need to have a situation where an attacker gets out a exploited media file which people commonly transcode via FFMPEG. Not an easy task.
This sure does matter to the likes of google assuming they are using ffmpeg for their backend processing. It doesn't matter at all for just about anyone else.
You might as well tell me that `tar` has a CVE. That's great, but I don't generally go around tarring or untarring files I don't trust.
AIUI, (lib)ffmpeg is used by practically everything that does anything with video, including such definitely-security-sensitive things as Chrome, which people use to play untrusted content all the time.
Ffmpeg is a versatile toolkit used in lot of different places.
I would be shocked if any company working with user generated video from the likes of zoom or TikTok or YouTube to small apps all over which do not have it in their pipeline somewhere.
There are alternatives such as gstreamer and proprietary options. I can’t give names, but can confirm at least two moderately sized startups that use gstreamer in their media pipeline instead of ffmpeg (and no, they don’t use gst-libav).
One because they are a rust shop and gstreamer is slightly better supported in that realm (due to an official binding), the other because they do complex transformations with the source streams at a basal level vs high-level batch transformations/transcoding.
There are certainly features and use cases where gstreamer is better fit than ffmpeg.
My point was it would be hard to imagine eschewing ffmpeg completely, not that there is no value for other tools and ffmpeg is better at everything. It is so versatile and ubiquitous it is hard to not use it somewhere.
In my experience there usually is always some scenarios in the stack where throwing in ffmpeg for a step is simpler and easier even if there no proper language binding etc, for some non-core step or other.
From a security context that wouldn't matter, As long it touches data, security vulnerabilities would be a concern.
It would be surprising, not that it would impossible to forgo ffmpeg completely. It would be just like this site is written Lisp, not something you would typically expect not impossible.
I wasn’t countering your point, I just wanted to add that there are alternatives (well, an alternative in the OSS sphere) that are viable and well used outside of ffmpeg despite its ubiquity.
If you use a trillion dollar AI to probe open source code in ways that no hacker could, you're kind of unearthing the vulnerabilities yourself if you disclose them.
