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aaviator42 | 6 months ago

An argument for a better defined file format specification perhaps, but I don't think it's necessarily a good thing for everyone to use or have to use the same implementation.

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socalgal2|6 months ago

As someone who works on specs that are shared across different organizations' implementations, you can write all the specs you want but no conformance tests = no conformance.

aaviator42|6 months ago

A good point! Conformance tests seem like a great idea to me to go along with specs.

Muromec|6 months ago

If everyone has the same parser the whole classes of bugs just stop being exploitable. The classic one being one parser at the edge validates somethhing and the further down the line sees another result which it expects tp be rejected during validation.

Both parsers could be buggy, but when they have different kinds of bugs, you get a zero click undetectable exploit

woodruffw|6 months ago

I don’t think it’s this simple: you can still produce observable differentials with a single parser by using different options within that parser in different places. The ZIP format itself affords ample opportunities for that.

aaviator42|6 months ago

It significantly increases the attack surfaces of bugs that do exist in the parser if the same implementation is used everywhere.