The results of which you'll never be 100% sure are correct...
But file(2) is already like that - my data files without headers are reported randomly as disk images, compressed archives or even executables for never-heard-of machines.
Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification
41–50 of 262 posts
Re: Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification
#42I'm extremely confused about the claim that other tools have a worse precision or recall for APK or JAR files which are very much regular. Like, they should be a valid ZIP file with `META-INF/MANIFEST.MF` present (at least), and APK would need `classes.dex` as well, but at this point there is no other format that can be confused with APK or JAR I believe. I'd like to see which file was causing unexpected drop on prec…
The `file` command checks only the first few bytes, and doesn’t parse the structure of the file. APK files are indeed reported as Zip archives by the latest version of `file`.
Re: Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification
#43It seems to detect my Android build.gradle.kts as Scala, which I suppose is a kind of hilarious confusion but not exactly useful.
Re: Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification
#44What are use-cases for this? I mean, obviously detecting the filetype is useful, but we kinda already have plenty of tools to do that, and I cannot imagine, why we need some "smart" way of doing this. If you are not a human, and you are not sure what is it (like, an unknown file being uploaded to a server) you would be better off just rejecting it completely, right? After all, there's absolutely no way an "AI powered" tool can be more reliable than some dumb, err-on-safer-side heuristic, and you wouldn't want to trust that thing to protect you from malicious payloads.
Re: Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification
#45It seems like it defeats the purpose of such a tool that this initial version doesn’t have polyglot files. I hope they’re quick to work on that.
Re: Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification
#46What are use-cases for this? I mean, obviously detecting the filetype is useful, but we kinda already have plenty of tools to do that, and I cannot imagine, why we need some "smart" way of doing this. If you are not a human, and you are not sure what is it (like, an unknown file being uploaded to a server) you would be better off just rejecting it completely, right? After all, there's absolutely no way an "AI powered…
> no way an "AI powered" tool can be more reliable
The article provides accuracy benchmarks.
> you would be better off just rejecting it completely
They mention using it in gmail and Drive, neither of which have the luxury of rejecting files willy-nilly.
Re: Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification
#47A somewhat surprising and genuinely useful application of the family of techniques. I wonder how susceptible it is to adversarial binaries or, hah, prompt-injected binaries.
It gets a lot of binary file formats wrong for me out-of-the-box. I think it needs to be a bit more effective before we can truly determine the effectiveness of such exploits.
Re: Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification
#48What are use-cases for this? I mean, obviously detecting the filetype is useful, but we kinda already have plenty of tools to do that, and I cannot imagine, why we need some "smart" way of doing this. If you are not a human, and you are not sure what is it (like, an unknown file being uploaded to a server) you would be better off just rejecting it completely, right? After all, there's absolutely no way an "AI powered…
Virus detection is mentioned in the article. Code editors need to find the programming language for syntax highlighting of code before you give it a name. Your desktop OS needs to know which program to open files with. Or, recovering files from a corrupted drive. Etc
It's easy to distinguish, say, a PNG from a JPG file (or anything else that has well-defined magic bytes). But some files look virtually identical (eg. .jar files are really just .zip files). Also see polyglot files [1].
If you allow an `unknown` label or human intervention, then yes, magic bytes might be enough, but sometimes you'd rather have a 99% chance to be right about 95% of files vs. a 100% chance to be right about 50% of files.
Re: Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification
#49What does it do with an Actually Portable Executable compiled by Cosmopolitan libc compiler?
Re: Magika: AI powered fast and efficient file type identification
#50> So far, libmagic and most other file-type-identification software have been relying on a handcrafted collection of heuristics and custom rules to detect each file format. This manual approach is both time consuming and error prone as it is hard for humans to create generalized rules by hand. Pure nonsense. The rules are accurate, based on the actual formats, and not "heuristics".
the rules aren't based on the formats, but on a small portion of them (their magic numbers). this makes them inaccurate (think docx vs zip) and heuristic.