Signing could let a document script connect back to the domain of the signator but not other sites, allowing most normal forms to work,but not add-in malware from third parties.
Is scribus safe pdf#
Or require that the PDF be signed by a trusted authority so you know that the PDF isn't malicious or, that if it is, the author can easily be found and prosecuted. Just don't let script connect to remote hosts. There is nothing that says you can't put a JavaScript interpreter in your PDF reader and disable certain features. What you allow scripts to do can make it insecure - letting the script silently connect to a remote URL with no user action required is a potential privacy violation (although not necessarily a security violation). Just because a PDF has script support doesn't in any way make it inherently insecure. There's really not a whole lot that's different between scripting SVG and scripting PDF from a security stand point.įurthermore, scripting isn't at all a security problem. To make it dynamic, you script it with, well, JavaScript. Posted 20:43 UTC (Thu) by elanthis (guest, #6227) But I think it's more worthwhile to spend the effort on developing a security model than on trying to persuade application providers that they should not incorporate desirable features and extensions.
Not that we have such a mechanism in place to deal with it, mind you. It would be better to have a working security model that protected the user from potential abuse via each of these mechanisms, regardless of which program they happen to be embedded in. Trying to deal with these by splitting a document format or application program into multiple variants, each with its own set of permitted extensions, will just distribute those same security issues among an ever-increasing set of similar programs. Hyperlinks, intelligent forms, the possibility of pulling data into a document via execution of an external program - each of these seems reasonable at first glance, but each brings with it an increasingly large set of security issues. Yet there are clear benefits and an understandable motivation to add hyperlink support to a document creation/display system. That potential abuse (monitoring who reads the document) arises directly from the incorporation of an ability to follow http hyperlinks. Posted 17:06 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841)Īs the original article about Remote Approach made clear, the slippery slope starts well before the addition of scripting capabilities. Perhaps if someone were to start spreading malicious PDFs now before susceptible clients become too widespread, it might have a salutory effect. Heck, even make it a superset of PDF, but give it a different name/extension/mime-type/magic-number, so we know what we're dealing with.Īnd the thing is, this crap will catch on because most people will ignore the potential downside until it's too late. Sure, a format for "intelligent forms" (at the extreme, consider tax returns) would be nice, but that should be distinguished from an electronic substitute for paper.
Is scribus safe portable#
Tell me again why we need executable scripts (to say nothing of automatically executed scripts) in a Portable Document Format? (I can think of a few bad reasons, but.)
Next comes tools to scan PDFs for viruses, etc. (It's enough to tempt one to do that to some of the developers of said software.)
Is scribus safe software#
Not so much that data can executable, but that so many apps out there (nearly everything from a certain large northwest software maker comes to mind, but there are plenty of other culprits) insist that if it can be executed, it will be executed.
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