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.
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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.
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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