From: "Mattias Engdegård" <mattiase@acm.org>
To: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>
Cc: 44018@debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#44018: Don't consider play-sound-file to be a 'safe' function
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2020 21:01:20 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <024E3091-EB4E-419F-847B-CDB2FF3C96CC@acm.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <83zh4nwgbs.fsf@gnu.org>
15 okt. 2020 kl. 19.26 skrev Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
> Any details for the uninitiated, or pointers to the info?
You are definitely not uninitiated but others may be so please bear with me.
There are many things that can go wrong:
Playing sound files involves lots of code and libraries, sometimes even executing external processes.
Sound file formats are complex and a player typically needs to understand several different ones; security-related bugs are not uncommon.
Sound file players may also need access to the hardware, which can greatly amplify the severity of any breach.
> Are the risks the same on all the supported platforms, or just on
> some?
The security fundamentals (as above) are the same everywhere; details obviously differ. Even if we could pronounce one platform as entirely 'safe' for audio-playing, which I don't think is feasible, I don't see the gain from doing so.
Obviously 'safe' has to be understood in context. Can Emacs be tricked to call play-sound-file with the name of a crafted file as argument? Maybe; as far as I can tell, unsafe is only used by SES in Emacs proper, but it seems feasible to create a .ses file that calls play-sound-file without asking the user. To assume otherwise would be imprudent.
It is true that the hostile Internet has hardened audio file code considerably over the years but why would we explicitly make a security exception for a function with large attack surface in an application (Emacs) that may very well be used for inspection of potentially harmful files?
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-10-15 19:01 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-10-15 16:55 bug#44018: Don't consider play-sound-file to be a 'safe' function Mattias Engdegård
2020-10-15 17:14 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2020-10-15 17:26 ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-10-15 19:01 ` Mattias Engdegård [this message]
2020-10-15 19:20 ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-10-16 9:45 ` Mattias Engdegård
2020-10-26 11:51 ` Mattias Engdegård
2020-10-26 15:29 ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-10-26 16:19 ` Mattias Engdegård
2020-10-26 17:09 ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-10-26 18:25 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2020-10-26 16:32 ` Stefan Kangas
2020-10-26 16:51 ` Mattias Engdegård
2020-10-16 5:39 ` Lars Ingebrigtsen
2020-10-16 6:23 ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-10-26 17:05 ` Basil L. Contovounesios
2020-10-26 17:16 ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-10-26 17:38 ` Mattias Engdegård
2020-10-26 18:28 ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-10-26 20:36 ` Mattias Engdegård
2020-10-31 8:06 ` Eli Zaretskii
2020-10-31 13:33 ` Mattias Engdegård
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