Two New Tools that Tame the Treachery of Files
Parsing is hard, even when a file format is well specified. But when the specification is ambiguous, it leads to unintended and strange parser and interpreter behaviors that make file formats susceptible to security vulnerabilities. What if we could automatically generate a “safe” subset of any file format, along with an associated, verified parser? That’s our collective goal in Dr. Sergey Bratus’s DARPA SafeDocs program.
But wait—why is parsing hard in the first place? Design decisions like embedded scripting languages, complex context-sensitive grammars, and object models that allow arbitrary dependencies between objects may have looked like good ways to enrich a format, but they increase the attack surface of a parser, leading to forgotten or bypassed security checks, denial of service, privacy leakage, information hiding, and even hidden malicious payloads.
Two examples of this problem are polyglots and schizophrenic files. Polyglots are files that can be validly interpreted as two different formats. Have you ever read a PDF file and then been astonished to discover that it is also a valid ZIP file? Or edited an HTML file only to discover that it is also a Ruby script? Congratulations, you discovered a polyglot. This is not to be confused with schizophrenic files: That’s when two parsers interpret the same file in different ways, e.g., your PDF displays different content depending on whether you opened it in Adobe Acrobat or Foxit Reader, or your HTML page renders differently between Chrome and Internet Explorer.
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