Comment by bob1029
11 hours ago
Does google drive apply any transformation over the PDF, or are you effectively loading the same document in your browser on the round trip?
11 hours ago
Does google drive apply any transformation over the PDF, or are you effectively loading the same document in your browser on the round trip?
I often view PDFs in Drive, and it's definitely not just displaying the document with the native web browser. It is rendered with their "Drive renderer", whatever that is. They don't even display a simple .txt file natively in the browser.
They have some kind of virus scanner for files you open via a share link. Not sure about the ones you have stored on your own drive unshared.
But probably the main security here is just using the chrome pdf viewer instead of the adobe one. Which you can do without google drive. The browser PDF viewers ignore all the strange and risky parts of the PDF spec that would likely be exploited.
And yet browser PDF viewers still have vulnerabilities and hackers keep finding sandbox escapes.