Oh, that's clever. It's not just hiding the payload in the Exif, it's hiding the fact that the payload came from the network at all, by reading it from the browser cache (presumably after embedding the image into a page the user visited).

So you have a package that doesn't include (directly) malicious code or make network calls, yet it can still run malicious code from the network. This is much better than simple obfuscation because you can vary the payload, like a command-and-control server.

▲

nine_k 17 hours ago | parent [-]

More than that; the trigger code can sit passively and just check the cache for whatever payloads may come its way.

I suppose image sanitizers come soon to browsers. Only sanitized images will be cached; anything the browser can't make sense of will be thrown away.

	▲	account42 6 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Exif is only the most convenient method here - you can use steganography hide arbitrary data right in the image content itself. Sanitizing would that would mean messing with how images look.
	▲	8n4vidtmkvmk 16 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		ComfyUI embeds workflows in the EXIF data. It's very handy. Would be a little sad if they stripped that out but there are alternatives. I suppose if it's only cached images and not manually downloaded images it wouldn't be bad. It'd probably break some website somehow though.