[sldev] How Far For Security?

[Celierra Darling]

On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 7:33 PM, Callum Lerwick <seg at haxxed.com> wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 21, 2008 at 3:14 PM, Argent Stonecutter
> <secret.argent at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Even if a non-standard format that's a serialization of the internal
>> structures is faster and more efficient?
>
> Until you have to change the internal structures and suddenly your cache
> needs to be wiped and re-filled. Which would defeat the purpose of the
> cache.

I think that the cache is mostly just to tide things over from one
session to the next.  If we suppose that people don't upgrade their
viewer far more often than people upgrade it (a reasonable
assumption), then the cache is doing its job the vast majority of the
time, even if it were cleared at every upgrade.  I doubt that such
cache clears would be a significant source of cache misses, compared
to, say, capacity misses after hopping around a few densely-textured
areas.

For fun, the extensibility of TIFF looks like it can be abused to hold
a bunch of serialized stuff in addition to raw image data, and you
could massage it so that standard image apps can't read the important
stuff.  For further cruelty, you could put serialized junk where TIFF
would expect image data and have the real data in such tags, and it
might still be considered a valid TIFF. ;)  (Okay, so this probably
isn't what you mean by "standard file format"...)

Cel