> I think TIFF has some unique features that makes it more prone to certain security issues[] compared to other formats, such as storing absolute file offsets instead of relative offsets.

That’s an impressive number of CVEs for a fairly modest piece of code, although the sheer number of them dated ≥ 2022 baffles me—has a high-profile target started using libtiff recently, or has some hero set up a fuzzer? In any case libtiff is surprisingly nice to use but very old and not that carefully coded, so I’m not that shocked.

I’m not sure about the absolute offsets, though. In which respect are those more error-prone? If I was coding a TIFF library in C against ISO or POSIX APIs—and without overflow-detecting arithmetic from GCC or C23—I’d probably prefer to deal with absolute offsets rather than relative ones, just to avoid an extra potentially-overflowing addition whenever I needed an absolute offset for some reason.

There are things I dislike about TIFF, including security-relevant ones. (Perhaps, for example, it’d be better to use a sequential format with some offsets on top, and not TIFF’s sea of offsets with hopefully some sequencing to them. Perhaps ISO BMFF is in fact better here; I wouldn’t know, because—well—ISO.) But I don’t understand this particular charge.

Absolute file offsets demand a particular memory layout or some extra bookkeeping that could be avoided with relative offsets. If I were to write a JPEG parser, I could write a function to handle one particular segment and not have to worry about other segments because relative offsets makes parsing them independent, compared to TIFF where I need to maintain a directory of things and make sure the offsets land in the right place.

I think parsing file format with absolute offsets is similar to handling a programming language with all GOTOs, compared to relative offsets which are more like structured control flow.

If you’re interested in BMFF and don’t care to spend ISO prices, you can always go back to the original, Apple’s QuickTime File Format: https://developer.apple.com/standards/qtff-2001.pdf