The Most Dangerous Codec in the World: Finding and Exploiting Vulnerabilities in H.264 Decoders

Modern video encoding standards such as H.264 are a marvel of hidden complexity. But with hidden complexity comes hidden #security risk. #Decoding video today involves interacting with dedicated #hardware accelerators and the #proprietary, privileged software components used to drive (#driver) them. The video #decoder ecosystem is obscure, opaque, diverse, highly privileged, largely untested, and highly exposed -- a dangerous combination.

We introduce H26Forge, a framework that carefully crafts #video files to expose edge cases in H.264 decoders....

By: Stephen Checkoway , Hovav Shacham , Willy Vasquez

Full Abstract and Presentation Materials

#VideoEncoding #Vulnerabilities #Security #Codec #H264 #Exploit