FFmpeg to Google: Fund us or stop sending bugs

I’m an open source maintainer, so I empathize with the sentiment that large companies appear to produce labor for unpaid maintainers by disclosing security issues. But appearance is operative: a security issue is something that I (as the maintainer) would need to fix regardless of who reports it, or would otherwise need to accept the reputational hit that comes with not triaging security reports. That’s sometimes perfectly fine (it’s okay for projects to decide that security isn’t a priority!), but you can’t have it both ways.

My takeaway from the article was not that the report was a problem, but a change in approach from Google that they’d disclose publicly after X days, regardless of if the project had a chance to fix it.

To me its okay to “demand” from a for profit company (eg google) to fix an issue fast. Because they have ressources. But to “demand” that an oss project fix something with a certain (possibly tight) timeframe.. well I’m sure you better than me, that that’s not who volunteering works

On the other hand as an ffmpeg user do you care? Are you okay not being told a tool you're using has a vulnerability in it because the devs don't have time to fix it? I mean someone could already be using the vulnerability regardless of what Google does.

Sure but how.

Let's say that FFMPEG has a 10 CVE where a very easy stream can cause it to RCE. So what?

We are talking about software commonly for end users deployed to encode their own media. Something that rarely comes in untrusted forms. For an exploit to happen, you need to have a situation where an attacker gets out a exploited media file which people commonly transcode via FFMPEG. Not an easy task.

This sure does matter to the likes of google assuming they are using ffmpeg for their backend processing. It doesn't matter at all for just about anyone else.

You might as well tell me that `tar` has a CVE. That's great, but I don't generally go around tarring or untarring files I don't trust.

Ffmpeg is a versatile toolkit used in lot of different places.

I would be shocked if any company working with user generated video from the likes of zoom or TikTok or YouTube to small apps all over which do not have it in their pipeline somewhere.