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FFmpeg to Google: Fund Us or Stop Sending Bugs (thenewstack.io)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/foss@beehaw.org
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[–] 1 point 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

Have any of the google-submitted vulnerability reports turned out to be invalid? Project Zero was pretty well regarded.

Yes I know about the asm code in ffmpeg though IDK if it's doing anything that could lead to a use after free error. I can understand if an OOB reference happens in the asm code since codecs are full of lookup tables and have to jump around inside video frames for motion estimation, but I'd hope no dynamic memory allocation is happening there. Instead it would be more like a GPU kernel. But, I haven't examined any of it.

Anyway there's a big difference between submitting concrete input data that causes an observable crash, and sending a pile of useless spew from a static analyzer and saying "here, have fun". The Curl guy was getting a lot of absolute crap submitted as reports.

From the GCC manual "bug criteria" section:

If the compiler gets a fatal signal, for any input whatever, that is a compiler bug. Reliable compilers never crash.

That sounds like timelessly good advice to me.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)

    Project Zero

    Project zero was entirely humans though, no GenAI. Project big sleep has been reliable so far, but there is no real reason for ffmpeg developers to value project big sleeps 6.0 CVE's over potentially real more critical CVEs. The problem is that Google's security team would still be breathing down the necks of these developers and demanding fixes for the vulns they submitted, which is kinda BS when they aren't chipping in at all.

    Anyway there’s a big difference between submitting concrete input data that causes an observable crash, and sending a pile of useless spew from a static analyzer and saying “here, have fun”

    Nah, the actually fake bug reports also often have fake "test cases". That's what makes the LLM generated bug reports so difficult to deal with.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago

    6.0 is pretty serious according to the rubric. Are there some worse ones? Yes Google is acting obnoxious per your description. It makes no sense to me that they are balking about supplying some funds. They used to be fairly forthcoming with such support.

    I can imagine a CI system for bug reports where you put in the test case and it gets run under the real software to confirm whether an error results, if one has been claimed. No error => invalid test case.

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