Hacker News Reader

Comment by tpmoney | Hacker News Reader

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"

View on HN

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!

Google does do that.

This bit of ffmpeg is not a Chrome dependency, and likely isn’t used in internal Google tools either.

> Just publishing bug reports by themselves does not make open source projects secure!

It does, especially when you first privately report them to the maintainers and give them a plenty of time to fix the bug.

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.

The timeline here is pretty long, and Google will provide an extension if you ask.

What do you believe would be an appropriate timeline?

>especially if you consider other security notices that may have a bigger impact.

This is a bug in the default config that is likely to result in RCE, it doesn’t get that much worse than this.

> 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.

They're actively making open source projects less secure by publishing bugs that the projects don't have the volunteers to fix

I saw another poster say something about "buggy software". All software is buggy.

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.

Then they should mark it as low priority and put it in their backlog. I trust that the maintainers are good judges of what deserves their time.

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.

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.

If it was a rendering bug it would be a waste of time. But they also wouldn't have any pressure to fix it.

An exploit is different. It can affect anyone and is quite pertinent.

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.

> 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.

xkcd 2347

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.

Here's ffmpeg's site: https://www.ffmpeg.org

I fail to see a single Google logo. I also didn't know that Google sonehow had a contract with ffmpeg to be their customer.

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.

> if you look on ffmpeg’s site you’ll find a link

> 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.

https://x.com/michael__ni/status/1989391413151518779

--- end quote ---

Hint: just because people do some consulting for a customer doesn't mean that they are continuously paid to work on something.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com