CWE-201: Information Exposure Through Sent Data - CVE-2016-1897, CVE-2016-1898 When a user opens a maliciously crafted playlist file in ffmpeg, ffmpeg will query a server for remote data. By carefully crafting the playlist, an attacker can cause ffmpeg to request internet URIs that expose file:// content from the victim's machine. CVE-2016-1897 refers to an issue with processing playlists that use concatenations, while CVE-2016-1898 refers to a related issue with subfiles.



According to a mailing list post from MITRE's CVE team:



The essential problem is that a crafted file forces the victim to visit an arbitrary external URL, but this URL is constructed using data from the victim's local filesystem.



More details are provided by the researcher in a blog post (in Russian).



Libav is a fork of ffmpeg and is also vulnerable.