That's fair. Though the disparity is still an order of magnitude...

More seriously, my point is that SQLite is very unlikely to be the most vulnerable piece of software in your stack. It's probably the most stable and bug free piece of software that you use on a day to day basis that hasn't been formally proven correct. Even openoffice itself has more CVEs: https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=openoffice

And some of them are due to the very issue I brought up above...

> CVE-2012-0037 Redland Raptor (aka libraptor) before 2.0.7, as used by OpenOffice 3.3 and 3.4 Beta, LibreOffice before 3.4.6 and 3.5.x before 3.5.1, and other products, allows user-assisted remote attackers to read arbitrary files via a crafted XML external entity (XXE) declaration and reference in an RDF document.

> My point is that SQLite is very unlikely to be the most vulnerable piece of software in your stack.

Sqlite is very high quality, but I am rather doubtful this is true if you actually care about having a secure system to start with. I can think of three main reasons an office suite would have serious security vulnerabilities:

1. It's written in an unsuitable, memory-unsafe, programming language (as most office suites sadly are).

2. It includes an unsuitable programming language for scripting purposes (Word Macros are of course infamous for this).

3. Vulnerabilities in one of its dependencies (like XML parsers)

If you care to, 1 and 2 are very easy to avoid and 3 will be pretty hard to avoid completely, but you can limit your exposure. You need a GUI toolkit at the minimum, but you can completely avoid parsing as an attack vector by either not using a braindamaged format like XML in the unlikely case you don't need compatibility, or if you must, use an xml (zip etc.) parser written in a memory safe language. If you followed all other steps, but chose sqlite instead, I'd say chances a very good it's now your main vulnerability.

You have crafted a nigh-impossible tower of requirements that you admit are way beyond what is commonly practiced in the software under question in order to disclaim the statement "SQLite is very unlikely to be the most vulnerable piece of software in your stack". Right now on the front page of HN is an article about how Microsoft was also a victim of what may come to be labeled the most impactful hack ever, a list which includes most (all?) US government agencies. The root vuln? A crap admin password used by an IT monitoring software company which has software deployed to an alarming percentage of the industry.

I dunno man, I feel like my original statement is pretty reasonable. Let's please not move the goalposts to the moon. :)

I don't think your statement is unreasonable at all coming from the common perspective that it is part of the natural order of things that opening a text document would expose your computer to a non-negligible risk of hostile takeover.

Personally I find this a very unreasonable thing to accept. Secure (single user) text processing (etc.) is not a hard problem at all and there is zero reason it should create any security risks.

Crap passwords (and security practices) are not pertinent at all here, unless you also argue that Boeing shouldn't really bother to make airplanes with non-lethal autopilot interactions because being killed by a mis-designed airplane is the least of risks to the typical US citizen's life give how obese he or she is.

The pertinent question is: if you are to design a wordprocessor, should you avoid baking sqlite into the design because of security concerns? I think you should. Sqlite is written and tested very well, but it is written in not formally verified C, and using a memory unsafe language for reading potentially hostile databases poses a completely unnecessary and avoidable security risk.

Or run the IO in a sandbox where it is streamed out in a simpler/safer format. Or run the entire suite in a sandbox like we do with parts of web browsers.

How is this better than just avoiding the problem in the first place?

Because SQLite, as a general purpose database system, can be used for loads of things.

A two-piece component (DB + sandbox) that you use for 100 different things is going to end up much more secure (overall) and require less human effort than maintaining 100 different systems for each use case.

It's like "don't roll your own crypto". That is the advice not because it's impossible to roll your own secure crypto, but because it is just much more likely that you will repeat bugs that other people have already figured out, so it is better if everyone is using one library so that when an issue is found and resolved, it applies to everyone. It is still good advice even though that 3rd party crypto lib is probably going to have a lot of unneeded functionality that actually increases the overall attack surface area than if you made your own for whatever your specific purpose is. I think the same logic applies here.