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Take potentially dangerous PDFs, and convert them to safe PDFs

https://github.com/freedomofpress/dangerzone
41•dp-hackernews•1h ago

Comments

dfajgljsldkjag•1h ago
I personally just upload them to google drive. It would be a serious pwn if they could somehow still do a compromise through google drive.
gleenn•29m ago
Do you have any specifics on what Drive does? Any examples of it fixing embedded virii? Or is this blind assumption?
akersten•24m ago
I assume they mean "upload to drive and use the web based reader to view the PDF," not "upload to drive and download it again"
bob1029•13m ago
Does google drive apply any transformation over the PDF, or are you effectively loading the same document in your browser on the round trip?
snowmobile•41m ago
It's a neat program, but what's the use for JPGs and PNGs?
boston_clone•17m ago
There are some neat detection bypass / compromise methods using various image formats, including PNG [0] and SVG [1]!

I imagine that folks like journalists could have that type of attack in their threat model, and EFF already do a lot of great stuff in this space :)

0. https://isc.sans.edu/diary/31998

1. https://www.cloudflare.com/cloudforce-one/research/svgs-the-...

mike_d•15m ago
Shameless self promotion: preview.ninja is a site I built that does this and supports 300+ file formats. I'm currently weekend coding version 2.0 which will support 500+ formats and allow direct data extraction in addition to safe viewing.

It is a passion project and will always be free because commercial CDR[1] solutions are insanely expensive and everyone should have access to the tools to compute securely.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Disarm_%26_Reconstruct...

coppsilgold•14m ago
While useful it needs a big red warning to potential leakers. If they were personally served documents (such as via email, while logged in, etc) there really isn't much that can be done to ascertain the safety of leaking it. It's not even safe if there are two or more leakers and they "compare notes" to try and "clean" something for release.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitor_tracing#Watermarking

https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.3597

The watermark can even be contained in the wording itself (multiple versions of sentences, word choice etc stores the entropy). The only moderately safe thing to leak would be a pure text full paraphrasing of the material. But that wouldn't inspire much trust as a source.

alphazard•9m ago
I seem to remember Yahoo finance (I think it was them, maybe someone else) introducing benign errors into their market data feeds, to prevent scraping. This lead to people doing 3 requests instead of just 1, to correct the errors, which was very expensive for them, so they turned it off.

I don't think watermarking is a winning game for the watermarker, with enough copies any errors can be cancelled.

coppsilgold•3m ago
> I don't think watermarking is a winning game for the watermarker, with enough copies any errors can be cancelled.

This is a very common assumption that turns out to be false.

There are Tardos probabilistic codes such (see the paper I linked). Which have the watermark scale as the square of the traitor count.

For example, with a watermark of just 400 bits, 4 traitors (who try their best to corrupt the watermark) will stand out enough to merit investigation and with 800 bits be accused without any doubt. This is for a binary alphabet, with text you can generate a bigger alphabet and have shorter watermarks.

crazygringo•3m ago
This doesn't seem to be designed for leakers, i.e. people sending PDF's -- it's specifically for people receiving untrusted files, i.e. journalists.

And specifically about them not being hacked by malicious code. I'm not seeing anything that suggests it's about trying to remove traces of a file's origin.

I don't see why it would need a warning for something it's not designed for at all.

chaps•9m ago
Heh, I've seen this a bunch of times and it's of interest to me, but honestly? It's sooooo limiting by being an interface without a complementary command line tool. Like, I'd like to put this into some workflows but it doesn't really make sense to without using something like pyautogui. But maybe I'm missing something hidden in the documentation.
crazygringo•6m ago
It seems to meant for end-users like journalists processing files individually like e-mail attachments.

It doesn't seem to be meant for usage at scale -- it's not for general-purpose conversion, as the resulting files are huge, will have OCR errors, etc.

chaps•5m ago
I'm the target audience for this sort of tool. :)

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