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Re:Malicious Subtitles Threaten Kodi, VLC and Popcorn Time U... by marcosdumay on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @08:31AM (#14409507)
At least SRT files are a purely declarative sequence of lines with "time time text".
Re:Malicious Subtitles Threaten Kodi, VLC and Popcorn Time U... by Khao on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @10:24AM (#14410209)
"Officially", SRT files are only timecodes and text, but most players support html codes directly like <b> <i> <u> to support more formatting options than the basic SRT. I wonder if some of them simply render the text as html and could be vulnerable to similar attacks. I say "Officially" because SRT has no standard, it just evolved through usage and it's a fucking mess, as I'm a software dev working on a subtitling editor software.
Re:Malicious Subtitles Threaten Kodi, VLC and Popcorn Time U... by olau on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @11:42AM (#14410837)
I seen a similar problem in another context where a browser engine is used to render some simple HTML in an app for convenience, but then suddenly turns into something exploitable because nobody is thinking about updating the engine when a bug is found in an esoteric (for the app) feature.

Embedded web engines should probably have a minimalistic safe mode.

Re:Malicious Subtitles Threaten Kodi, VLC and Popcorn Time U... by jbk on Wednesday May 24, 2017 @08:44AM (#14409564)
But SSA is not. It's specifying a font and sometimes even shipping a font inside the SSA file.