I saw another poster say something about "buggy software". All software is buggy.
This is significant when they represent one of the few entities on the planet likely able to find bugs at that scale due to their wealth.
So funding a swarm of bug reports, for software they benefit from, using a scale of resources not commonly available, while not contributing fixes and instead demanding timelines for disclosure, seems a lot more like they'd just like to drive people out of open source.
An exploit is different. It can affect anyone and is quite pertinent.
It looks like they are now starting to flood OSS with issues because "our AI tools are great", but don't want to spend a dime helping to fix those issues.
xkcd 2347
I fail to see a single Google logo. I also didn't know that Google sonehow had a contract with ffmpeg to be their customer.
> Note the names of those maintainers. Now go to fflabs.eu
> Now click on the “team” link and check out the names
Quite an investigative work you've done there: some maintainers may do some work that surely... means sonething?
Meanwhile actual maintainer actually patching thousands of vulnerabilities in ffmpeg, including the recent ones reported by Google:
--- start quote ---
so far i got 7560€ before taxes for my security work in the last 7 months. And thats why i would appreciate that google, facebook, amazon and others would pay me directly. Also that 7560 i only got after the twitter noise.
https://x.com/michael__ni/status/1989391413151518779
--- end quote ---
Hint: just because people do some consulting for a customer doesn't mean that they are continuously paid to work on something.
This bit of ffmpeg is not a Chrome dependency, and likely isn’t used in internal Google tools either.
> Just publishing bug reports by themselves does not make open source projects secure!
It does, especially when you first privately report them to the maintainers and give them a plenty of time to fix the bug.
Nobody is against Google reporting bugs, but they use automatic AI to spam them and then expect a prompt fix. If you can't expect the maintainers to fix the bug before disclosure, then it is a balancing act: Is the bug serious enough that users must be warned and avoid using the software? Will disclosing the bug now allow attackers to exploit it because no fix has been made?
In this case, this bug (imo) is not serious enough to warrant a short disclosure time, especially if you consider *other* security notices that may have a bigger impact. The chances of an attacker finding this on their own and exploiting it are low, but now everybody is aware and you have to rush to update.
What do you believe would be an appropriate timeline?
>especially if you consider other security notices that may have a bigger impact.
This is a bug in the default config that is likely to result in RCE, it doesn’t get that much worse than this.
Likely to get RCE? No. Not every UAF results in a RCE. Also, someone would have to find this and it's clearly not something you can easily spot from the code. Google did extensive fuzzing to discover it. The trade off is that Ffmpeg had to divert resources to fix this, when the chance it would have been discovered independently is tiny, and exploited even tinier.