[Hackers]

Nice PDF bro,
but can it run Linux?

- 10x engineer on a mission to ... not hit the deadline for the far more trivial project.

Video demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWnN-FA3zRM

Article / write-up:
https://hackaday.com/2025/02/10/nice-pdf...nux-yikes/

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The days that PDFs were the granny-proof Swiss Army knives of document sharing are definitely over, according to [vk6]. He has managed to pull off the ultimate mind-bender: running Linux inside a PDF file. Yep, you read that right. A full Linux distro chugging along in a virtual machine all encapsulated within a document.

PDFs have long been vectors for malware, but this pushes things further: PDFs with computational power. We know not to trust Word documents, whether they just capable of running Doom, or trash your entire system in a blink. This PDF anomaly unfolds a complete, powerful operating system in front of your very eyes. Should we think lightly, and hope it’ll lead to smarter, more interactive PDFs – or will it bring us innocent looking files weaponized for chaos?

>>> Obviously this method will only lead to chaos, in my opinion.

[Bastille]

I've always been amazed by this kind of hacks, like running Doom on calculators and even emulating a working computer in Mincraft

These people are true genius

[Hackers]

I've always been amazed by this kind of hacks, like running Doom on calculators and even emulating a working computer in Mincraft

These people are true genius

Oh yeah, super impressive feats

I remember the MC computer. I had been researching Turing complete standards and stumbled on it. If I remember correctly it used a series of in game switches for binary or something.

The DOOM in Google Sheets was another surprise haha

[Hackers]

there's also DOOM in pdf :3 crazy, i wonder if ppl are able to run malware too.

Yeah I have to look into it more to see how it’s done. Not sure if it breaks out of the PDF or what.

I’m assuming it’s all fine tuned to very specific versions / environment and that modern malware would be tough.