Ha there is no way that 99% of the world population know what to do with those links / hashes / whatever they are.
It’s been over a decade since I’ve used BitTorrent and I didn’t know magnet links were still popular. I hate seeding and there was also a lot of malware hidden in public trackers.
Once I switched to Usenet I never looked back. P2P file sharing has never been a good experience for me.
But even without anything more than open, decode, play - anywhere a vulnerability exists could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code.
Really, a video player should be a dumb bit of glue code that wires together file open APIs with video playback APIs, and a few bits and bobs for saving preferences (API) and allowing remote control (another API). There’s no reason whatsoever for a video player to be able to access files arbitrarily or connect to the internet or log keystrokes in the background or anything else! The only reason they can do this is because we haven’t built operating systems with all this in mind, apart from mobile OS’s that is.
"Standard APIs" isn't some silver bullet to never have any security vulnerabilities. There can absolutely be vulnerabilities in "standard APIs".
ffmpeg is a pretty standard media utility, and it gets lots of CVEs. Decoding complicated media is complicated and often done in unsafe languages in attempts to squeeze more performance.
https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-3611...
We have this kind of API permission (capability) system on phones. Why can’t we have a really fine-grained one on desktops? It’s like a firewall for APIs.
The level of lockdown you were describing is what we have on mobile platforms (which incidentally still have lots of malware). Generally speaking, people want more flexibility out of general purpose computers.
On the other hand something like pledge would be useful here, since the attack vector is untrusted files, not untrusted applications. With pledge, the application could open any files, then relinquish the ability to open new files before parsing the contents.
I expected this response. I think it's a false equivalence. We don't need to have a proprietary locked-down operating system like iOS in order to give the user full control over the capabilities an application has access to. We just need a standard API for handling these sorts of permissions.
Curious to hear how you would go about solving this problem. It seems that there is just a lot of inherent complexity here and I can't see any way to avoid that complexity without preventing the system from being useful.
It's not reliable unless you happen to know the specific, unpatched exploit on the target system. There aren't general purpose vulnerabilities for such things.
If an attack corrupts how the OS checks permissions, it doesn't matter if you've got some API framework for calls, it broke out of it.
file system for finding external subs (or like, playing the video)
internet for streaming
and then oh look, it has the permission
With my Usenet automation I’ve never had the issue in about 9ish years but it could happen. I pay a usenet provider and indexer a low fee to rid myself of torrents and seeding.
> Safe and fast parsers with Nom and Rust
It used an old version of vlc and a buffer overflow vulnerability to get code execution.
Certainly don't miss those hours of waiting for an ISO to download only to find it's all corrupt, or a record label plant, or a handheld recording of a cinema screen...
I think you mean 2 decades. I haven't waited an hour for anything to download since I used to grab bootleg concerts that were very poorly seeded in the early/mid aughts.