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by realkitkat 3688 days ago
7-zips track record of lack of vulnerabilities [1] would imply something entirely different to me. Only 2 CVEs ( and now this ) in a heck of a long time. 7z being used in quite a variety of places it seems like a lucrative attack vector, so I would expect that ample amount of fuzzing and other techniques has gone into trying to break it over the years. Which obviously doesn't mean, as these findings highlight, that it would be in any way infallible either. But to say they don't take security seriously sounds little unfair to me.

[1] https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-9220...

1 comments

Just because you don't see a CVE doesn't mean there aren't major flaws. It just means the researcher didn't want to bother with getting a CVE.
Yes, the number of reported vulnerabilities isn't a good metric to judge the security of a project. It often means that few people bothered to look, and that when developers fixed a bug they didn't try to find out whether it was exploitable.

The latter is supported by the fact that changelog entries don't discriminate between security bugs and normal bugs, and by the fact that no vulnerability was ever reported by the developers themselves.

More worryingly, in all instances where a vulnerability was reported, the CVE vulnerability was filed specifically because the reporters were security researchers. This means that when a normal user reported a crash bug, no vulnerability was EVER filed. How likely do you think it is that none of those crashes could possibly be turned into an exploit? There are 95 instances of "Some bugs were fixed" in the changelog.