this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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What the fuck is a zero day in the context of ffmpeg?
Its not like its a system service that you can get ingress through..
"AI found 21 bugs in massive video project" sounds like junior developer shit hungry to get some shit on their resume.
Even if it wasn't AI slop, this wouldn't be impressive.
Indeed. AI agents cannot "discover" zero days, they can only discover vulnerabilities. The humans can create zero days by reporting the vulnerability in the media without disclosing it properly.
With a competently crafted payload, you could perhaps get in via someone's transcoding pipeline.
Does nobody isolate ffmpeg and friends from their application?
I can't imagine you'd have much fun breaking into a container that terminates the moment the original ffmpeg stops, or over-runs its max execution time..
Container escapes do exist, and they have shared kernel with the host
If you're running rootless containers, it's less of a concern. I'm trying to move all of my public containers to podman for this reason
My understanding is that ffmpeg is the bedrock that all video streaming services use. I'm suspicious it's a bigger deal than you think
Don't forget various conversion services, which includes photo cloud backups.
if you upload any image on lemmy, it goes through ffmpeg to be converted into a webp file.
now, you can feed arbitrary input to that ffmpeg process
I never thought of doing that with ffmpeg. Why ffmpeg, instead of imagmagick?
ffmpeg is on any system, has a consistent user interface for many different conversions
It just so happens that many video codecs are based on image formats, so ffmpeg already has a lot of the complex machinery to do so available to also implement these image formats - internally it can just handle it as a single frame of video with specialized formats for that.
Imagemagick (and other tools) also work, but why use multiple pieces of software if what you already have is adequate? ImageMagick is also software, and can also have vurnabilities.
From the article
I imagine there are many web services around the world which use ffmpeg to handle user submitted content.
Tell me you know nothing about the intricacies of media playback (especially hardware accelerated), without telling me...
FFMPEG in the command line generally has permission to access the entire non-sudo filesystem and delete files.
Yes but why are we allowing user input to be fed to an executable in that environment?
This is the environment that almost all user software is executed.
Discovering bugs is not "AI slop".
That term refers to something the AI made. This is just product testing, where a real human then fixes it as intended.
Many moderate to large open source projects are effectively being ddosed by vibe coders submitting hallucinated and non-issue bug reports solely because claude or copilot said so. Those reports are absolutely slop, no different from anything else generative ai platforms shit out.
But sure, go off on how this particular kind of output from an LLM is somehow different from rest.
Edit: fixed a typo