Comment by efitz
8 days ago
This is amazing and terrifying (I am a security engineer and parsing complex document formats is a never-ending treasure trove of vulnerabilities).
8 days ago
This is amazing and terrifying (I am a security engineer and parsing complex document formats is a never-ending treasure trove of vulnerabilities).
The amount of attack surface in various format parsers is pretty stunning and terrifying indeed
Theres a malaysian movie where the main premise is a hacker who uses pdf executions to steal one cent from every persons bank account. Its pretty interesting.
Do you know the name of the movie?
Not OP, but I found a series, not a movie, titled _One Cent Thief_ that fits the description. Sounds interesting.
https://archive.org/details/OneCentThiefSeries
The "code execution" in PDF parsing is what enabled this legendary zero-click, zero-day exploit of iOS devices: https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...
That exploit is indeed legendary but the code execution involved is not JavaScript. In fact the iOS PDF renderer does not have JavaScript enabled.
Obviously a skill issue; a true hacker would re-enable it.
AI agents run in isolated VMs, but PDFs have been out here running in the open for 30 years!
But can your PDF run an AI agent?
> But can your PDF run an AI agent?
Oh it's so much worse than that. Your font can run an AI agent.
Llama.ttf: A font which is also an LLM -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40766791
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In my opinion the question isn’t so much “if” but rather “when”.
When will AI research and hardware capabilities reach a point that it’s practical to embed something like that into a regular document?
We’ve already seen proof of concept LLMs embedded into OpenType fonts.
I guess the other question is then “what capabilities would these AI agents have?” You’d hope just permission to present within that document. But that depends entirely on what unpatched vulnerabilities are lurking (such as the Microsoft ANSI RCE also featured on the HN front page)
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Looking forward to a day when you may not have a powerful enough GPU to open a PDF
The first widespread AI Malware will be a historic moment in this century. It will adapt like a real biological virus to its host and we have no cure for this.
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This isn't even the beginning of what's possible in PDFs.