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Comment by perching_aix | Hacker News Reader

> The tone of the CVE docs are because people freak out about CVEs flagged by automated tools when the CVEs are for issues that have no security impact for typical usage of SQLite, or have prerequisites that would already have resulted in some form of compromise.

The CVE docs:

> The attacker can submit a maliciously crafted database file to the application that the application will then open and query

This is exactly the normal use case GP talks about with application file formats.

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That's true, but most usage of sqlite is not as an application file format, and many of those CVEs don't apply even to that use case. The reason people have policies around CVE scanning is because CVEs often represent real vulnerabilities. But there's also a stuff like "this regex has exponential or polynomial runtime on bad inputs", which is a real security issue for some projects and not others, depending on what the input to the regex is. That's also true for SQLite, and I'm guessing that the author of that page has spent a bunch of time explaining to people worried about some CVE that their usage is not vulnerable. The maintainer of cURL has expressed similar frustration.

> but most usage of sqlite is not as an application file format,

This is exactly the OTHER way around. Most usages of SQLite are as an application file format. Firefox stores bookmarks, history, cookies in SQLite files in the profiles folder. Messaging apps (WhatsApp, Signal, etc. use SQLite for chat history). macOS and Windows use SQLite in various subsystems, ex: Spotlight metadata, application cache. Mobile apps use SQLite heavily. And probably ten thousand other cases as a file format if I bother to look up more.

Mobile apps store SQLite dbs in their private data directory that only they can access. In order to exploit a vulnerability you'd have to first break the sandbox. Desktop OSes generally have far weaker protections than that, if you have access to the user's profile directory you can steal all of their credentials or plant executables etc.

When I think application file format I think of something like .txt, pdf, or .doc, where it's expected that you'll receive untrusted input passed around. In that case it makes a lot more sense to restrict which features of SQLite are accessible, and even then I'd worry about using it in widely - there's so much surface area, plus the user confusion of shm and wal files.

On the other hand, exploiting weaknesses in MITRE’s CVE program to create ticket management primitives, creating “shellcode” that composes them to implement a feature request tracking API, using it to manage your open source organization’s feature roadmap, sure would make for a great 2600 article…

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