Adobe Launches Sandboxed Flash Player For Firefox, Hopes For Fewer Exploits - DotTechnologies

The design is similar to that of Adobe Reader X Protected Mode

Adobe has released a beta version of Flash Player for Firefox, which has better protection against vulnerability exploits because of a new sandboxed architecture.

"The design of this sandbox is similar to what Adobe delivered with Adobe Reader X Protected Mode and follows the same Practical Windows Sandboxing approach," said Peleus Uhley, platform security strategist at Adobe, in a blog post on Monday. "Like the Adobe Reader X sandbox, Flash Player will establish a low integrity, highly restricted process that must communicate through a broker to limit its privileged activities."

In secure software development, sandboxing refers to the practice of isolating a process from the operating system in order to minimize the fallout of a potential exploit. This type of technology has gained popularity in recent years, primarily because of its use in Google Chrome, a browser that has never experienced a successful remote code execution attack so far.

Adobe decided to implement sandboxing in Adobe Reader back in 2010 in order to counter the large number of exploits that targeted the product and its users. The technology was built into Adobe Reader X (10.0) and is based on the same sandboxing principles that Google used when developing Chrome.

Later that same year Adobe also launched a sandboxed version of Flash Player for Chrome and promised to explore the possibility of doing the same for other browsers. The new sandboxed Flash Player for Firefox, which works with Windows Vista and Windows 7, is the result of those efforts.

Critical Flash Player vulnerabilities have regularly been exploited to infect computers with malware during the past several years. Along with Java and Adobe Reader, Flash Player is one of the most attacked software applications because its vulnerabilities can usually be exploited by simply visiting a malicious website.

"Since its launch in November 2010, we have not seen a single successful exploit in the wild against Adobe Reader X," Uhley said. "We hope to see similar results with the Flash Player sandbox for Firefox once the final version is released later this year."

However, the success of this version at deterring cybercriminals from writing Flash Player exploits in the future will largely depend on how quickly it gets adopted. In order to speed up the process, Adobe is working on a new update mechanism, the company's senior manager for corporate communications, Wiebke Lips, said.

Having a sandboxed version of Flash Player for every major browser, not just Chrome and Firefox, is also important, if Adobe wants cybercriminals to lose interest in its product. "We are currently in the process of researching the best path to provide Flash Player sandbox protection for Internet Explorer," Lips said.

However, because Internet Explorer has a completely different plug-in architecture than Chrome and Firefox, namely ActiveX, developing a sandboxed Flash Player version for it requires a different approach, Lips said. Nevertheless, the current version of Flash Player supports Protected Mode in Internet Explorer 7 or later on Windows Vista and Windows 7.

Article Source: http://www.infoworld.com/

PHP 5.3.10 Fixes Critical Remote Code Execution Vulnerability - DotTechnologies

The vulnerability was introduced by the fix for a hash collision denial-of-service flaw.

The PHP Group released PHP 5.3.10 on Thursday in order to address a critical security flaw that can be exploited to execute arbitrary code on servers running an older version of the Web development platform.

The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2012-0830 and was discovered by Stefan Esser, an independent security consultant and creator of the popular Suhosin security extension for PHP.

SecurityFocus classifies the issue as a design error because it was accidentally introduced while fixing a separate denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability in early January.

That vulnerability is known as CVE-2011-4885 and was disclosed in December 2011 at the Chaos Communication Congress by security researchers Alexander Klink and Julian Wälde.

It affects a number of Web development platforms including PHP, ASP.NET, Java and Python and can be exploited in a so-called hash collision attack. The PHP development team addressed CVE-2011-4885 in PHP 5.3.9, which was released on Jan. 10.

"The fix for the Hash Collision DoS introduced a new directive (max_input_vars) to limit the number of accepted input variables," said Carsten Eiram, chief security specialist at vulnerability research firm Secunia.

"However, due to a logic error in the "php_register_variable_ex()" function in php_variables.c certain cases are not handled correctly when the number of supplied variables is greater than the imposed limit," he explained.

This error can be exploited by attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on a system that runs a vulnerable PHP installation. PHP 5.3.9 along with any older versions for which the hash collision DoS patch was backported, are affected, Eiram said.

Proof-of-concept code that exploits this vulnerability has already been published online, so the likelihood of attacks targeting CVE-2012-0830 are high. Web servers administrators are advised to upgrade to PHP 5.3.10 immediately.

 Article Source: http://www.infoworld.com/