A russian researcher Maxim Andreev (Максим Андреев) from cloud.mail.ru has discovered recently an appaling (and also embarrassing) security hole in FFmpeg (a popular open source video/audio processing library (yes, thanks god(s) it is open source)). The vulnerability may potentially lead to SSRF and local file read (which in turn may be pretty devastating). To put your computer at risk it is sufficient to keep it connected to the internet while processing with FFmpeg a specially crafted .mpeg file. So the attack may be aimed at servers and desktops as well, and it is important for the desktop users to know that nearly all GUI-oriented filemanagers and file-dialogs do run without a user's consent ALL the .mpeg files in the scope through the thumbnail creation procedure which is often built around FFmpeg library. Oh, my dear «user-friendliness»! Do you feel how problems are piling up?

The vulnerability is based upon the HLS (HTTP live streaming) feature (thanks to the reported vulnerability I now know what is live streaming — what a useful feature it must be). The core of the vulnerability is (as it happened many times before) a masquerade of filetypes multiplied by the stupidity of the modern days programmers. Effectively the worm is a PLAYLIST file masquerading as an ordinary .mpeg. And FFmpeg is programmed to process them «transparently» i.e. HIDE the distinction between them from the user. The playlist file is allowed to prescribe HTTP requeststs (supposedly to retrieve a file to play) and FFmpeg is eager to obey! Thus, FFmpeg being entitled to the access privileges of its caller SILENTLY sends HTTP-requests (full of potentially sensitive data) to an arbitrary HTTP-server in the internet.

Well done FFmpeg! well done!
And I personally send many non-sarcastic thanks to Maxim Andreev.

By the way, Maxim in his original article on habrahabr.ru describes some interesting practical exploits of the vulnerability, if anyone is interested, i can translate his article to English and post it here.

...and remember all vulnerabilities are deliberately created by someone.

During the development of the Cordova application «Siberian Dice» for Android I have encountered a particularly nasty trouble, so very tiny yet absolutely devastating. It was a very well hidden trap, and the experience of falling into this trap was so spectacular and puzzling that I was moved to create a stackoverflow.com account — imagine my frustration! It is a terrible feeling when you find out that the problem you just faced is not googleable, and even stackoverflow has no answer, not even a stupid one. So, I had to investigate it myself. I succeeded and (because I did not want anybody else to lose any more time on investigating the bug I already investigated) posted the solution on stackoverflow. And then I forgot the issue.
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I was asked to shed some light on the development process of Siberian Dice. Surprisingly, there are interesting aspects to speak about.

First of all, it was not meant to be a mobile application. It was all started as a purely mathematical endeavour. Initially, we wanted to investigate some properties of the game, once it appeared so elegant and sophisticated to us. At a certain point we decided to develop an AI, in order to produce some «real» games for further investigation, where by «some» I mean an amount orders of magnitude greater than a human can produce simply by playing the game full-time for several years.
So we did.
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