> Depends on what you're hardware accelerating and how you want to "accelerate" it. In the case of video decoding, ffmpeg would talk directly to the hardware. There wouldn't be an "OS" component to that (if there were, then ffmpeg wouldn't exist in the first place).
FFmpeg does not talk directly to hardware. That's the job of the OS and the drivers. They exist outside of the sandbox. So does the hardware itself.
> Actually it costs a great deal of time and effort to craft an exploit that would target a zero day on a modern browser even if the underlying OS API vulnerability is already known. And how many people would be vulnerable? It's not worth the effort for the tens of people vulnerable. That is unless you're intentionally targetting one specific individual with this known configuration....and now we're back to my point about your threat model.
You missed a step. More like two, actually. First, it costs almost nothing to include exploits for known out-of-date OSes (and browsers, but that's separate to this particular point). Second, if a modern browser is exploited, it needs a payload to deal with the OS on the outside. It, again, costs almost nothing to see if there's any low hanging fruit on the outside. And plenty of modern vulnerabilities affect older OSes, so you may just get it for actually free instead of nearly free.
Nobody who cares about their threat model is running an out-of-date OS. And yet, out-of-date OSes are vacuumed up in mass amounts for botnets. They're worth going after, even if the people running those machines don't even know what "threat model" means. They have an internet connection? That's plenty to make it worth the minimal effort.
> FFmpeg does not talk directly to hardware. That's the job of the OS and the drivers. They exist outside of the sandbox. So does the hardware itself.
It depends how you run (and build ffmpeg). ffmpeg supports a plethora of different hardware and software configurations. I don't know how Chromium runs ffmpeg -- likely different on each platform -- but Supermium could easily fallback to software decoding.
> You missed a step. More like two, actually. First, it costs almost nothing to include exploits for known out-of-date OSes
I haven't missed anything. We aren't talking about software that directly interfaces with the OS. We are talking about software that needs to escape the browser sandbox first.
It's all good and well saying "it costs nothing to include exploits for known out-of-date OSes" but how do you execute that payload? That's the hard part.
> Second, if a modern browser is exploited, it needs a payload to deal with the OS on the outside. It, again, costs almost nothing to see if there's any low hanging fruit on the outside. And plenty of modern vulnerabilities affect older OSes, so you may just get it for actually free instead of nearly free
> Nobody who cares about their threat model is running an out-of-date OS.
Exactly!! This browser is only going to be used on systems that aren't important. So the risk isn't as serious.
> And yet, out-of-date OSes are vacuumed up in mass amounts for botnets.
FFmpeg does not talk directly to hardware. That's the job of the OS and the drivers. They exist outside of the sandbox. So does the hardware itself.
> Actually it costs a great deal of time and effort to craft an exploit that would target a zero day on a modern browser even if the underlying OS API vulnerability is already known. And how many people would be vulnerable? It's not worth the effort for the tens of people vulnerable. That is unless you're intentionally targetting one specific individual with this known configuration....and now we're back to my point about your threat model.
You missed a step. More like two, actually. First, it costs almost nothing to include exploits for known out-of-date OSes (and browsers, but that's separate to this particular point). Second, if a modern browser is exploited, it needs a payload to deal with the OS on the outside. It, again, costs almost nothing to see if there's any low hanging fruit on the outside. And plenty of modern vulnerabilities affect older OSes, so you may just get it for actually free instead of nearly free.
Nobody who cares about their threat model is running an out-of-date OS. And yet, out-of-date OSes are vacuumed up in mass amounts for botnets. They're worth going after, even if the people running those machines don't even know what "threat model" means. They have an internet connection? That's plenty to make it worth the minimal effort.