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Reconsidering ffmpeg in Debian

Reconsidering ffmpeg in Debian

Posted Aug 6, 2014 16:49 UTC (Wed) by amit (subscriber, #1274)
Parent article: Reconsidering ffmpeg in Debian

It would be good for both the projects to have coverity run on them. That will find all the bad-code related bugs easily.

It won't find all the security bugs arising out of improper handling of input streams, but would at least flag places which rely on user-controllable input that look suspicious, and that will give the developers a thought about the security aspect there.

Also, after the heartbleed fiasco, coverity is gaining some smarts in recognizing places that accept user input, so it's only a good thing to point coverity to a codebase that handles a lot of potentially hostile input.


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Reconsidering ffmpeg in Debian

Posted Aug 6, 2014 17:00 UTC (Wed) by JGR (subscriber, #93631) [Link]

ffmpeg and libav are non-trivial projects.
Expecting a tool to "easily" find all "bad-code" related bugs seems somewhat optimistic to me.
Arguably the bulk of ffmpeg/libav is in some way involved in handling user-controllable input (ie. audio/video input).

Reconsidering ffmpeg in Debian

Posted Aug 6, 2014 19:01 UTC (Wed) by markh (subscriber, #33984) [Link] (2 responses)

Both projects are already analyzed with Coverity.

ffmpeg: https://scan.coverity.com/projects/54
libav: https://scan.coverity.com/projects/106

Reconsidering ffmpeg in Debian

Posted Aug 7, 2014 16:27 UTC (Thu) by ux (guest, #98231) [Link] (1 responses)

See coverity fixes in FFmpeg: http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git&a=search&h=...

Coverity is quite nice BTW.

Reconsidering ffmpeg in Debian

Posted Aug 13, 2014 8:55 UTC (Wed) by ber (subscriber, #2142) [Link]

Coverity requires you to advertise for it and to not publish their detailed findings at their discretion (last time I've looked into their terms of service). This may be the reason I haven't found studies that compares it to other services. It would not be allowed right away. Also Coverity gets access to your evaluation of seriousness of security defects on their machines (located in the US I presume).
Those are significant drawbacks.

Made me look into stand-a-lone Free Software security checking tools like cppcheck, flawfinder or ASan/TSan/MSan.


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