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Adobe Still Ignores Elcomsoft-Discovered Holes
evenprime writes "In 2001, Dmitry Sklyarov
described vulnerabilities in Adobe
Acrobat and Adobe Acrobat Reader while
giving a talk at
Defcon 9.
As has
been
previously
mentioned, Dmitry was arrested the day after this talk. He and his company Elcomsoft were charged with violating the DMCA. Now Elcomsoft have announced that
Adobe, two years later,
has still not patched these bugs."
Maybe more companies will bait their software with easy exploits to snare those who try to circumvent it
If nothing else, it gives the companies an excuse to their shareholders for shoddy coding.
As I have said before, one of my friend is blind.
Have you got any idea how fscking difficult it is for the poor chap to read "protected"[1] PDF files? Trust me, it's pure hell!!
At least, since Adobe has decided to pull an MS on its users and ignore known problems, maybe I'll be able to crack some of these protected files for my friend, so that he can read them.
So, there are, er, ahem... unexpected benefits to this sh___y Adobe attitude...
Just my US$ 0.02...
[1] "Protected" as in: "can't print, can't copy, can't save as". Yes, Virginia, you can create that kind of PDF files!
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
Perhaps Adobe should work with Lexmark to help them out with the crypto coding; you know, that great company that protects the consumer against accidentally using cheap ink with strong cryptographic chips. Then Adobe could not only provide a PDF option to prevent you from printing a document, they could also enforce that if printed, a PDF document will only be printed with 100%-genuine Lexmark toner. Oh, I see another option with Kodak here, perhaps by embedding RFID tags directly in that specical Kodak paper.
BTW, did anyone notice that with the latest PDF specification, version 1.5, which corresponds to Acrobat 6, that they added verbage to the copyright/license part to enforce that all software which implements the PDF specification must obey all those stupid magic security bits? They claim the specification is open and free for anybody to develop software around it, but that since the "format" is copyrighted all independently developed software must obey their fragile DRM schemes. How in the world can they copyright a format; sure their specification is copyrighted being a printed work, but the "format"?
I, personally, would like to make my annoyance at this situation known.
Who do we contact at Adobe? How do we make a serious stink about this? Are the board members of this company contactable somehow? I'd go to the effort of writing a decent letter explaining to them their stupidity and callousness, if I knew where to send it.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
As soon as you implement this, we can talk.
Until Java is supported well cross-platform, and as soon as you can somehow get people to obey all your PHP-HTML-Java rules, then be queit.
The beauty of PDF, is exactly it's name Portable Document Format just about every platform supports PDF in one form or another, besides a couple ignored security holes here and there, I think PDF is a functional format.
You can have formatted text and images, looking the same on just about every platform that has a GUI.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
After all, we knew the DMCA would have this effect on companies and software, where bugfixes are unnecessary by litigation.
Why fix software when we can send lawyers and make examples and burning effigies instead?
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
As far as I know, most viruses in their execution work using common OS scripts and commands.
As far as I know, most Windows viruses can't spread without either 1. opening an outgoing connection on SMTP's port, 2. telling Outlook to open an outgoing connection on SMTP's port, or 3. opening executables installed by the administrator for writing. Not giving unknown programs the capability to do this would stop viruses from spreading. This is possible even in a Windows environment: don't allow unknown programs to open connections to ports they have no business with (e.g. only Postfix should open an SMTP session), don't give users the right to overwrite files outside of the temp directory and the user's home directory, and run executable e-mail attachments as the Guest user.
Will I retire or break 10K?
This really shouldn't surprise anyone. The DMCA gives companies a right to sue if you reverse engineer an encyption device. But the DMCA offers no protecting to the consumer by requireing a company to FIX the problem.
Besides /., this story has not had a whole lot of publicity. Add to that the fact that most people wouldn't know how to decrypt the e-books (and, more importantly, probably don't all that much care), there really isn't much incentive for Adobe to fix it.
The puzzling thing to me is that it seems like it really wouldn't cost all that much to fix. I mean, it is a patch afterall and every friggin time I start up Photoshop Elements it is downloading some update (though not sending any of my personal information... hehe!).
IAAL, so what I start to think is: Does Adobe have any liability for failure to patch the software when an author loses money because his or her ebook is pirated? No doubt in advertising and selling the software, Adobe touted the encryption as a safety feature. Contributory infringement, maybe? Misrepresentation? A warranty theory? Hmm....
Adobe is trying to tell customers that they have a format in which you can send a document to someone, and that document will only be readable on that one computer, or will not be printable, or will not be copyable to the clipboard or whatever.
This is fundamentally impossible. If my computer can display the document on screen for me, then this means that the computer MUST have all the required information to do so. This includes any and all secret keys if the document is encrypted and so on.
This implies that the computer also has all the info needed to print the document, or copy it to the clipboard or whatever. Now, Adobes product could only work if the computer "knew" how to do this, but refused to do it anyway, in other words, if the computer was not obeying the end-user.
This is possible with secure hardware and similar that refuse to run code that is not digitally signed by the real master (not the end-user and owner!). But with the current computers that happily run anything you the user want in priviledged mode it is not possible.
Sure they could, and probably should, patch this spesific hole. But there's nothing Adobe can do to make they so-called "secure pdf" actually do what they claim it will do. And they know it.
The DMCA sucks, Adobe is unresponsive, and Dmitry shoulda been released promptly.... but regardless of all that, everybody should remember that we're dealing with a for-profit company that discovered weaknesses and first created and SOLD for-profit exploits and went on a campaign to promote it... and only reported to CERT after a legal battle that forced them to pull their commercial exploit product from the market.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
>You generally use vector fonts in HTML (such as Truetype Arial and Times).
Sure, go ahead and specify those fonts. Is my Lynx text mode console browser going to render them? What you mean is that it should look as you intended on (e.g.) IE 6.0.2800.1106.xpsp2.030422-1633 on XP Home build 2002 SP1 English with the exact fonts that you had on your machine when you created it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Too many people don't pay attention to where their plug-ins and other downloads come from - that is where a big part of the problem starts. End users need to own up to that fact that when a warning comes up about an unsigned or questionable certificate, they need to ask some serious questions before installing.
Sure, Adobe still has a "vulnerability" in the strict sense of the word, and if they want to continue marketing a weak security product, that is their business. In my opinion, their inspired release of Acrobat Elements will make Adobe a bigger player and Acrobat a major product. Going in to this with a problem is just bad business and will not help them. And whacking the messenger with the DMCA is definitely not a solution!
Couldn't agree with you more, I'm quite convinced that American companies are all about taking the easy way, in technology and elsewhere. I can't tell you how many times my managers have tried to convince me "the right thing" was building a substandard product, or screwed up a product by doing something that SOUNDS good to a roomfull of suits but is in reality incredibly stupid and shortsighted.
Engineers have to share some of the blame however, I can't tell you how many good engineers refuse to go in to management because they honestly beleive they are incapable (by virtue of being an engineer and not the best-people persons) or because they don't wnat to turn into their present manager and make those boneheaded decisions. Part of being a good engineer or manager is learning how to tell the boss to shove it when he asks you to do something wrong. Good bosses (technical or not) won't hold it against you as long as you're polite. Bad bosses don't deserve your help. Either way, bad management starts with bad understanding of technology, and gets worse with overly docile (and job-scared) engineers. People skills have value, but lets face it, knowing how a good widget gets built is more important.
UNIX is not immune, just an unlikely target because:
.1% of computers that were UNIX would figure in.
1) It (has been/is) relatively uncommon. The old Mac OS had a couple hundred native viruses, compared to the tens of thousande for MS OSes. It's not because they were less vulnerable, it's because they were less common. Now, extrapolate from the 95/5% usage patterns of Windows 3.1/Mac OS 7, and try to figure out howmany viruses the old
2) Huge variety of platforms. The same compiled code that runs on an PA-RISC machine will not run under Sparc, MIPS, POWER, etc. Add into that the wide variety of OSes on each platform (Sparc Linux, Solaris, Sparc NetBSD) and you have a relatively low concentration of machines vulnerable to any given exploit.
3) Different users. The dicks who write virii are usually not going to be the same people that administer a machine for a living, they're going to be the 20-year-old college kid with too much time on his hands. They have access to a Windows machine, but probably not high-level access to a *NIX machine.
4) Most virii we see now are not OS-targetted. Sure, it may use Win32 functions, but it's really an Outlook virus. Or a Word virus.
5) Low chance for inter-machine interaction. What's the chance that a Windows machine will be talking to another Windows machine? Wost users are on a Windows machine, so the list of possible transmission vectors is immense compared to those for other platforms.
Sure, the security model in UNIX is more thorough than that of Windows. Still, there have been a fair number of root exploits in common daemons lately that would allow a worm/virus to spread - but because of the above reasons, UNIX just isn't a good target for a virus writer.
± 29 dB
I think the prior poster was worried about having no control over distribution of his writings. And it sure looks like this vulnerability makes Adobe NOT do what Adobe says - that's like false advertising. Here's a quote from the report:
However, using the vulnerability described above, the plug-in with forged signature can perform virtually everything, including but not limited to:
- removing or modifying any restrictions (from copying text to Clipboard, printing etc) from the documents loaded into Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader;
- remove any DRM (Digital Rights Management) schemes from PDF documents, regardless the encryption handler used -- WebBuy, InterTrust DocBox, Adobe DRM (EBX) etc;
- modify or remove digital signatures used within a PDF document;
- affect any/all other aspects of a document's confidentiality, integrity and authenticity.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good