Data owned by the same user/privilege context that reads it. You should not be sharing this kind of data between privilege contexts regardless of the format it's in.
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Only data in standard serialized formats for transmission should be shared between privilege contexts. Ever.
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SQLite is intended to be a standard serialized format for transmission. Please read through sqlite.org/whentouse.html. It's intended to be used for things like an implementation of the file format for GIMP or a word processor. It's not trying to be an alternative to MySQL.
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Then that's an obviously bad intent incompatible with their security policy. Nobody should be using db files for information interchange.
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Not necessarily. A great example was for a proteomics data format. Thermo Scientific used SQLite for their Proteome Discoverer file format, which included both the spectral data (for mass spectrometry) and the metadata. /1
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Major competitors include MIME (yes, MIME), which aimed to be emailed across various vendors (from Matrix, for MASCOT). Another competitor included plain text files, and open-source XML files. However, the plain text files were gigabytes and painfully slow. So, SQLite or HDF5.
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Would you rather people roll their own database format, or use a single tool that aims to be used for that purpose? And, considering the number of bugs I've encountered with HDF5, I'll gladly sign onto the SQLite train.
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For the explicit use-cases I'm listing though, that is an expectation. People post proteomics files online for public use, so randomly uploading and downloading files for people to run on a local application is an expected use, much like it is with Word documents.
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Sharing image editing documents / word processing documents, etc. is irresponsible? What about media files? It's certainly a design objective of SQLite to handle untrusted files properly and they put far more effort into that than most alternative file format implementations.
They are also far more successful at avoiding vulnerabilities in practice. Still, there are occasional memory corruption bugs. It doesn't make sense to blame on them rather than the tooling. I would certainly rather open an untrusted SQLite database than an MP4 file with FFmpeg.
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I would expect more servers have been hacked due to exploits in ImageMagick than SQLite. Should we stop opening untrusted images on the web as well?
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It's not sharing them that's irresponsible. What's irresponsible is designing interchange formats for data that obviously needs to be shared on top of complex structured data formats with insecure implementations.
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