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by lolinder 883 days ago
Attack surface is about all the ways in which your software might be used to harm you or your customers. It's more than just remote code execution or DOS attacks.

For many use cases stripping EXIF is a hard requirement for user privacy and security, and it's reasonable for OP to point out that cutting that out to cut lines of code would be inappropriate in many situations.
1 comments
torstenvl 883 days ago
Privacy is not the same as security. They are related, but distinct.

Show me the CVE that would provide any weight to the inflammatory and egregious claim that OP is a hypocrite.

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RamblingCTO 882 days ago
Take a breather, nobody called OP a hypocrite.

> This article is a bit hyprocritical

Privacy in that sense is security. Never heard of OSINT? EXIF tags are of course security relevant.

/e: to make it more obvious: if I know your neighbourhood I can just blackmail you, I don't even have to hack you. I can gather information by maybe finding out your identity, getting insight into security questions and how you might answer them. I can find newspaper articles you were maybe part of etc. etc.

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xigoi 882 days ago
If you put a photo with your location information on the internet, that’s your problem. It’s not the responsibility of whatever website you’re putting it on to decide for you if you want to share your location.
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RamblingCTO 882 days ago
You imply that this is widely known that images contain your location, which tbh is a very disconnect assumption of the general populous.
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lolinder 882 days ago
CVEs are not the be-all-end-all of information security. CVEs are usually assigned to software that is distributed, not to web-based SaaS products, social media services, or similar, which are all the places where EXIF data leaks come into play.

For example, there was no CVE issued for the security flaw that leaked private information of 530 million Facebook users before 2019 [0], but that was obviously a significant security flaw.

Edit: Also, regarding "privacy is not the same as security"—the line is a lot fuzzier than you think. At my org the same team ("infosec") is responsible both for the security of our products and the enforcement of rules regarding PII, because they're tightly interrelated—the main concern with security incidents is that we might lose PII. There's a reason why one of the 7 data protection principles in the GDPR is security [1]—without it there is no privacy.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/09/986005820/after-data-breach-e...

[1] https://gdpr.eu/what-is-gdpr/?cn-reloaded=1

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