ensuring uploaded files are safe

Question

My boss has come to me and asked how to enure a file uploaded through web page is safe. He wants people to be able to upload pdfs and tiff images (and the like) and his real

Answer 1

Viruses embedded in image files are unlikely to be a major problem for your application. What will be a problem is JAR files. Image files with JAR trailers can be loaded from any page on the Internet as a Java applet, with same-origin bindings (cookies) pointing into your application and your server.

The best way to handle image uploads is to crop, scale, and transform them into a different image format. Images should have different sizes, hashes, and checksums before and after transformation. For instance, Gravatar, which provides the "buddy icons" for Stack Overflow, forces you to crop your image, and then translates it to a PNG.

Is it possible to construct a malicious PDF or DOC file that will exploit vulnerabilities in Word or Acrobat? Probably. But ClamAV is not going to do a very good job at stopping those attacks; those aren't "viruses", but rather vulnerabilities in viewer software.