That sounds nice in theory, but it seems obvious to me there is a major discrepancy between who is burdened with this responsibility, and who benefits from the result. Given many of these contributors are unpaid volunteers, maybe the infrastructure provider needs to secure FFmpeg in another way, for example by restricting codecs or by running it in a container?
They claimed that this was not a problem since the codec was so uncommon, but without doing steps like removing it from the main tree or making it not built by default in major distros.
I understand that from the perspective of "how many people will this crash for", but from a security perspective it is nonsensical. Even if it is an uncommon codec if the authors decide to keep the codepath there by default it is exploitable in most installs.
I love ffmpeg but that whole episode left a bit of a bad taste.
The creator of borg and k8s of course already run such tools for untrusted inputs in containers, but there is also an endless stream of container escapes.
