Even if they have real-world impact: ffmpeg is a volunteer project. With (ffmpeg -codecs | wc -l) 519 codecs. This will trivially exhaust available ffmpeg eng resources.
There's no law that you have to fix all bug reports. Isn't it better for users and developers alike that they can see the problems of the project. If they don't have resources that's fine, it's not like they are charging money for their product. But why not be honest and not request people sweep bugs under the rug for fear of looking bad?
Because it burns out developers and ruins the project. Its like how the treatment can be worse than the disease in medicine.
The CVEs get reported, then big corps automated systems start flagging all use of ffmpeg, the big corp security software stops builds and removes it from dev laptops, then frustrated big corp engineers start harassing the volunteers and soon its not worth volunteering anymore, and the project dies, and there was never a real world impact.
My point of view is that the unpaid ffmpeg maintainers should stop playing along with the corporate "security researchers" and not prioritize a bug over everything else simply because it's a CVE. In this case, the "high priority CVE" is from a reverse-engineered codec a hobbyist wrote to decode video from 1990s LucasArts video games. I think it's unreasonable to expect the maintainers to drop everything to fix a bug in a codec that most people will never use. If the trillion-dollar companies sending AI-generated CVE reports care so strongly about getting them fixed ASAP, they should really be fixing them themselves.
They're not being harrassed. You're basically saying that because FFmpeg doesn't have enough resources to fix all the security vulnerabilities, we should fix it by pretending like there are none.
My hope is that if they started responding to CVE bug reports for hobby codecs with something like “This is a codec written by someone in his free time and intended to be used for preservation purposes. We do not support using this codec with untrusted input and may not implement a fix for this bug within the 90 day CVE timeline”, it would stop the harassment. The companies doing the CVE spam would either have to start fixing things themselves, contract someone to do so, or stop using ffmpeg due to all the scary CVEs getting flagged in whatever bullshit security compliance standard they use.
It would not stop the harassment at all. These reports are effectively free for the originating organization to write using AI - and some low level junior looking for promotion within said org will be highly motivated to pump those metrics up come review time.
You’d have to basically blacklist these orgs from all bug reports and maybe open it up to a select few known trusted senior resources that care more about their personal reputation within the community vs. corporate politics.
> This bug is subject to a 90-day disclosure deadline. If a fix for this issue is made available to users before the end of the 90-day deadline, this bug report will become public 30 days after the fix was made available. Otherwise, this bug report will become public at the deadline. The scheduled deadline is 2025-11-20 [https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/436510153]
Sounds like a threat to me. ffmpeg is a tiny team and Google is a goliath. Not to mention Google has used their AI to spam the same threat, about 8 times in the last few months https://ffmpeg.org/security.html