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Comment on FFmpeg 9.0parent

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It's all about time in the day, my friend. Do you want to secure a feature used by 100% of your users or 0.01% of your users? Which has a better ROI?

Given that it is easy to feed FFMPEG arbitrary input to exploit any vulnerability, popular codecs are very likely to be already secure enough, while unpopular ones are far more dangerous and deserve more attention. It can be assumed that an attacker would target the worst, easiest to exploit codec they can find in the whole of FFMPEG.

It's used by most users, that's what they are saying, it doesn't matter that the file format is obscure.

If you make a video player based on ffmpeg you take input videos. The attacker can share a specially crafted video with the victim. Same kind of attack as sharing word documents.

when it comes to security popularity doesn't matter all that much. If something is not used and insecure then the decision should be to drop the feature, not to ignore the security issue.

If Big Deployment is using a stock ffmpeg build rather than one that actually enables only the things they actually use, I feel like that's on Big Deployment.

But the point of ffmpeg is that it can consume pretty much any format. If you let end users upload videos, that is exactly what you need, it’s not desirable to have a very restrictive list of formats you will accept.

Not having massive exposed and untested surface area is very much desireable. Every platform has a highly restrictive list of formats and containers for this exact reason.

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