Two New Tools that Tame the Treachery of Files
Summary: Trail of Bits released two open-source tools, PolyFile and PolyTracker, from work tied to DARPA's SafeDocs program, aimed at the parsing weaknesses that make file formats vulnerable to polyglots and schizophrenic files. PolyFile identifies over 10,000 file formats and recursively maps embedded files, while PolyTracker instruments a parser to map its functions to the input byte offsets they operate on, replacing the union table in LLVM's Data Flow Sanitizer that capped tracking at 65,536 taints.
Why it matters: A file has no intrinsic meaning, as the post quotes Ange Albertini, so the same PDF can display different content in Acrobat versus Foxit Reader, and a PDF can also be a valid ZIP or git repository. The tools target the gap between parsers, where the unsafe portions of a format live in the symmetric difference of what each implementation accepts.
Read the original at Trail of Bits Blog ↗
- Topics
- Endpoint & Network Security
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