H26Forge is domain-specific infrastructure for analyzing, generating, and manipulating syntactically correct but semantically spec-non-compliant H.264 video files.

H26Forge has three key features:

1. Given an Annex B H.264 file, randomly mutate the syntax elements.
2. Given an Annex B H.264 file and a Python script, programmatically modify the syntax elements.
3. Generate Annex B H.264 files with random syntax elements.

This tool and its findings are described in the H26Forge paper.

See MOTIVATION.md to see how a H26Forge simplifies a previously manual PoC generation process.

You can downloaded the latest build on the releases page.

An up-to-date version of Rust is required to build H26Forge. Be sure to call rustup update.

Python 3 is required for editing videos.

Linux/Mac

./make.sh

Windows

./make.bat

These scripts just call cargo build --release and copy the binary to the top level directory.

To generate a video with the default configuration, run:

./h26forge generate -o out.264

To use a custom randomness range, modify (or copy and create a new file) the syntax element range in config/default.json and run:

./h26forge generate -o out.264 -c config/default.json

A simple script is included to generate a batch of 100 videos to a temporary folder. You can run it via:

./scripts/gen_100_videos.sh

The videos will be output to tmp/.

Another script is included to generate 100 videos using config/chrome.json.

./scripts/gen_100_chrome_videos.sh

You can open the videos in a browser by opening tmp/<output>/play_videos.html.

See GETTINGSTARTED.md for more usage details.

See Example: CVE-2022-22675 PoC to see the capabilities of editing syntax elements.

Contributions are welcome! Running cargo doc will produce the code documentation, available at target/doc/h26forge/index.html.

Some unit tests are available. You can run cargo test to see their output.

The H.264 (08/2021) Spec is 844 pages long, containing instructions for parsing the bitstream into syntax elements and reproducing video frames.

We can use the ITU test vectors to identify spec conformance for a particular profile. The ITU Test Vectors are available here.

To run the test vectors, you can run ./scripts/download_and_run_avcv1_test_vectors.sh. Alternatively, you can run

python scripts/end-to-end-tester.py --testdir <DIRECTORY>

where <DIRECTORY> points to any folder with .264 files.

• 99%: Bitstreams for Constrained Baseline, Baseline, Extended and Main profiles. FM1_BT_B.264 and FM1_FT_E.264 fail. The two failing videos use FMO, and have issues with CAVLC CoeffToken recovery, seemingly with getting the correct nC value based on neighbor values.
• 97%: Bitstreams for Fidelity Range Extensions (High, High 10, and High 4:2:2 profiles). The videos WB_10bit_QP21_1920x1088 and WB_10bit_QP21_I-Only_1920x1088 are too big to test.

W.R. Vasquez, S. Checkoway, and H. Shacham. “The Most Dangerous Codec in the World: Finding and Exploiting Vulnerabilities in H.264 Decoders.” In J. Calandrino and C. Troncoso, eds., Proceedings of USENIX Security 2023. USENIX, Aug. 2023.

The following bugs have been found with H26Forge's video generator. If you use H26Forge to find and report an issue, please let us know so we can include it in this list.

• CVE-2022-48434: Use-after-free in FFmpeg as used by VLC due to an SPS change mid-video.
• CVE-2022-42850: A lack of bounds-checking in SPS StRefPic list parsing leads to an iOS kernel heap overflow.
• CVE-2022-42846 [1], [2]: An IDR Inter predicted first slice leads to an iOS kernel infinite loop during reference picture list modification. 0-clickable.
• CVE-2022-32939 [1], [2]: More than 256 emulation prevention bytes in a correctly encoded H.264 bitstream led to an arbitrary iOS kernel write primitive. 0-clickable.
• CVE-2022-3266: Video width and height was not updated between container and SPS, and also across SPSes in Firefox. This led to a crash of the Firefox GPU process and an information leak.