Detailing the Security Risks In PDF Standard 136
crabel writes with this quote from the H Online:
"At the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin security researcher Julia Wolf pointed out numerous, previously hardly known security problems in connection with Adobe's PDF standard. For instance, a PDF can reportedly contain a database scanner that becomes active and scans a network when the document is printed on a network printer. Wolf said that the document format is also full of other surprises. For example, it is reportedly possible to write PDFs which display different content in different operating systems, browsers or PDF readers — or even depending on a computer's language settings."
Re:Abomination (Score:3, Insightful)
Excuse me, but a document format used for storing printed documents on a system should represent the document as if it was printed when viewed again, _not_ suddenly switch the language or layout or whatever.
If it were to display _different content_, as alleged, that would disqualify it from being able to be used for archival of government documents.
Re:Abomination (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not that internationalization is the work of the devil, but rather that it should happen at a higher level than an individual PDF. Allowing different content to be displayed in different language environments raises serious questions about document integrity: imagine a international contract PDF that displayed one payment for German users and another for French ones.
PDF-the-document-format is a good thing in that it allows perfect reproduction of a printed document anywhere. PDF-the-generic-container, on the other hand, is both frightening and of dubious utility, but I can see why Adobe might have a business case for trying to drive this approach anyway. This is why we can't have nice things.
Re:All right (Score:5, Insightful)
I happen to know Julia Wolf personally and I know she's not seeking publicity. In talks I've had with her in the past, she has described how open PDF is to attack and how bad Adobe's reader is at security. She designs and writes these attacks as part of her job in order to detect and block them. She's one of the white hats. I'm sure that the issues she's discussed were probably discussed previously with Adobe and a handful of other security researchers, hence "previously hardly known". The article is poorly written IMO.
Trying to say that she's a publicity-seeking person would be highly inaccurate. She does give talks at various security conferences around the world since that is her expertise and she knows what she's talking about.
The problem is that Adobe made PDF so flexible with so many features that it's impossible to block all the various exploits, not to mention that Adobe themselves don't have a very good track record with security, i.e. look at Flash. The fact that PDF can incorporate Javascript, Flash, multimedia and even execute arbitrary external programs makes it a nightmare to secure.
PDF is hacker-friendly way of making leaks (Score:5, Insightful)
Perfect example: when the TSA's army of contractors "redacted" a document for public release, they simply drew (in PDF) black rectangles above the redacted text. Yet the original text was still there and intact.
Some here seem to view content that's below the surface (not visible with standard settings on standard Adobe tools) as a problem. Yet it is the perfect route to security leaks, a treasure-trove to anyone who knows how to look below the surface. And we hackers are the ones who know how to do that.