A strange JPEG file
I had a JPEG file to analyze that would not render properly: image viewers would display an error, but no image.
My new jpegdump tool confirmed that it started with the right JPEG markers, but that the data sizes were wrong:
2576 bytes for an APP0 marker is really large...
Taking a look with a hex editor, I saw that the markers were present, but that the size of the data were wrong.
With re-search, I took a closer look at the markers with their data size:
The size of the data following a marker is encoded with two bytes, big endian notation. And for the first markers in the JPEG file, they all looked too large. Then I noticed that the 3rd byte (e.g. the first byte of the size field) was always 0x0A, were I expected it to be 0x00.
Counting all the bytes reveals that in this file, there were no 0x00 bytes but an unusual large amount of 0x0A bytes:
I formed a hypothesis: somehow, all 0x00 values were replaced by 0x0A values. To test this hypothesis, I replaced all 0x0A values by 0x00 values and parsed the result with jpegdump:
This was indeed a JPEG file. But I could not repair it, as I did not know what 0x0A values were original bytes, and which were replacemnt values for 0x00.
At least I new it was most likely not malicious, but corrupted by some unknown process.
Didier Stevens
Microsoft MVP Consumer Security
blog.DidierStevens.com DidierStevensLabs.com
Comments
Back then it was due to doing an FTP file transfer in "ASCII mode" to a Unix machine.
You'd be hard pressed to find an FTP server that doesn't default to "Binary mode" these days.
It _might_ be due to someone opening the JPG with a text editor; but they're usually fine too these days.
Anonymous
Oct 9th 2017
7 years ago
Anonymous
Oct 12th 2017
7 years ago