Comment by anoneng
2 days ago
I would say it’s the opposite. coreutils is core utils, you cannot write shell scripts without them, they are widely and almost unavoidably used in trusted environments. They are also relatively simple.
With ffmpeg, anyone who knows anything about secure application development in the past 20 years knows that it is a huge security tarpit and throwing it untrusted inputs in trusted environment is asking to be owned. You thoroughly sandbox that shit. That’s true for all untrusted media conversion, but absolutely with ffmpeg.
My point about coreutils was that they’re rarely used in situations where an attacker can provide arbitrary input - it’s more like race conditions with code already running on the same system trying to escalate access – so what you need to protect against are things like race conditions around file operations or symlink safety.
> you cannot write shell scripts without them, they are widely and almost unavoidably used in trusted environments.
True.
That doesn't make them "very exposed to memory safety errors".