Malicious Subtitles Threaten Kodi, VLC and Popcorn Time Users

Post by weberc2 » Wed, May 24, 2017, 2:40 PM UTC

Tepix wrote: post #80

captainmuon wrote: post #8

Wow, that is bad. I'm always amazed by such vectors in supposedly passive formats, like fonts, images, and so on. There is no excuse that these kind of applications are not completely sandboxed. All you need is some kind of DLL, raw data in, raw pixels out. In case of hardware accelerated codecs, raw pixels in, surface pointer in, nothing out. There is no need to be able to access the filesystem, etc.. To render subt…

"There is no excuse that these kind of applications are not completely sandboxed." Woah, what a sense of entitlement! What's your excuse for not having submitted a patch years ago?

Post by jbk » Wed, May 24, 2017, 2:43 PM UTC

OneLessThing wrote: post #126

I did security research on VLC on Windows a year or two ago. I may be remembering incorrectly, but last I recall every module was protected by ASLR. Which means that remote code execution is not likely because there is no scripting or network comms to dynamically create a valid ROP chain. I also didn't check for executable heaps at the time but given that all heaps are non executable (which they really shouldn't be e…

Post by jbk » Wed, May 24, 2017, 2:52 PM UTC

fulafel wrote: post #142

jbk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha, the famous sandboxing remark. I wish it was that simple! So, let me share some light on the sandboxing for multimedia (I work on VLC). If you sandbox an application like VLC, in the current way of doing sandboxing, which we've done for macOS, WinRT/UWP, and snaps, you still need a lot of permissions. Namely: - you need to be able to open files without user interactions (no file picker), in order to open playlist,…

You don't need special fast IPC. Even uncompressed video is fine over standard IPC.

Post by jessaustin » Wed, May 24, 2017, 2:59 PM UTC

lloydjatkinson wrote: post #68

Hollywood is resorting to shitty tactics

Post by simias » Wed, May 24, 2017, 3:01 PM UTC

Mister_Snuggles wrote: post #147

simias wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why sandboxing the userland is not a thing on the linux desktop at least. When you sanely configure a un*x server you generally at least create a user per application. The web server runs as www, the database with its own user, the ssh process runs as the logged-in user (the daemon runs as root obviously, but only for just as long as it needs before forking a less priviledged child) etc... But when…

> Maybe we've just been doing it wrong the entire time and we should just log into our single-user desktop computers as root and then spawn our shells and other applications as various unpriviledged users as necessary (this could easily be scripted in launcher scripts). I wonder if anybody has attempted to do that, but again I don't expect that Xorg would work very well in this configuration. Replace '...as various u…