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 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