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Zero-day Exploit in PDF With Adobe Reader
hankwang writes "Security researcher Petko Petkov, who is known for his recent discovery of a vulnerability with Quicktime in Firefox, claims to have discovered an exploit that allows arbitrary code execution when a maliciously crafted PDF document is opened in any version of Adobe Reader. Petkov did not disclose any technical details other than a video, but claims on his blog that Adobe has acknowledged the vulnerability. If this exploit goes wild, it could cause some serious problems, as PDFs are usually automatically opened from web browsers and widely used and trusted by corporate users."
my xpdf brings all the boys to the yard and they're like, its better than yours
Why UNIX?
i bet it doesnt work with ubuntu's pdf viewer :p
/smug
about time i got modded as a troll neway
It's still a big effing deal, because Reader is the most accessible and widely used PDF viewer out there.
So in the interest of the public, what alternative PDF readers can people use?
In addition to that I hope Adobe clues in and realizes, Reader is there to READ AND DISPLAY PDFs and nothing else. The last time I installed it under XP on my office workstation it wanted to shovel a bunch of crap into the tray and seemed to have a lot more cruft than it needed to. This is different from what I remember it being in High School where it was a simple viewer so the customers who paid for Acrobat had an easy way to tell their readers how to open the PDFs. It has since morphed into a product instead of just a utility.
From the blog:
"The vulnerability affects Windows XP SP2 with IE7 and Adobe Reader 8.1, 8.0 and 7. Windows Vista users are not affected."
The Foxit PDF reader is pretty great, and I often recommend it to my clients. Not only will it be a good temporary fix for this exploit, but it opens PDF documents very quickly.
Windows:
http://www.download.com/Foxit-PDF-Reader/3000-2079_4-10634896.html?tag=lst-0-1
Linux:
http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/desklinux/
Yeah, the article is lacking in details, which is unfortunate. Here is a nice little summary of not only the article, but also the speculation and arguments that have formed around the claims on a number of mailing lists.
InfoSec that matters, when it counts.
Foxit Reader is the canonical 3rd-party viewer for Windows: http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php
Macs have Preview, Linux has Evince and others.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
It's not a zero-day exploit until Petko releases code for the script kids to use without having a patch/update from Adobe.
"If this exploit goes wild, it could cause some serious problems, as PDFs are usually automatically opened from web browsers and widely used and trusted by corporate users."
If you are using firefox, there is a simple way around this. Just install the PDF download add-on, its also helps avoid the problems involving the embedded PDF plugin crashing your browser.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Does anyone here think that embedding Acrobat into a browser is a good idea? Ignoring the plethora of stupid people who use PDF when HTML would work better, even.
The summary makes me think it is some kind of stack smashing attack; probably an integer overflow. These can occur in the PDF parsing code, before you even have to look at features like scripting. On the other hand, if PDF is anything like PostScript here, and I believe it is, it is a programming language itself, which might lead to exploitable situations.
Also, an integer overflow was recently found and fixed in xpdf. This could be the same bug.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
On the other hand, if PDF is anything like PostScript here, and I believe it is, it is a programming language itself, which might lead to exploitable situations.
No. Postscript is a Turing-complete language. People have, e.g., written calculator programs in postscript, and implemented Conway's game of life in it. PDF is not Turing-complete, and that was an intelligent, intentional design decision. I think it had less to do with concerns about security than with not wanting to run a program on your printer without having any possible way to tell whether the program would ever terminate.
Find free books.
That's what I keep saying. A vulnerability is never zero day. An exploit is only zero-day if an in-the-wild exploit is discovered the same day that the software vendor and security communities become aware of it. Since this was posted as an undisclosed proof of concept three days ago, it is quite impossible for a zero day exploit to exist!
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
If the story's a day old before you report it, it's no longer a "zero-day" exploit.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
As a side note... Preview does an incredibly good job with PDFs that Adobe themselves can't even do. Back when I was a Windows user exclusively, I always complained that the "official" reader was dog slow even on the fastest machines, and could not ever scroll smoothly through any slightly complex document.
Now that I've switched to Mac and use Preview, I realize this isn't Windows, it's just Adobe's incompetence. Preview is fast as hell and NEVER lags in any way, while Adobe Reader for the Mac is as slow and bloated as its Windows brethren.
This was an announcement of a vulnerability that was discovered in Adobe Acrobat. There is nothing 0day about it, and it will not ever and can not ever be a 0day. Period.
The defining characteristic of 0day is the day an EXPLOIT is RELEASED, where such exploit also serves as the ONLY vendor notification of a bug being discovered. Every adult on this list understands the definition, but the kids can't seem to grasp the not-so-subtle nuance between a 0day and the discovery of a bug in someone else's code.
This supposedly serious disclosure referred to in the article is a non-event, there was a "press release" about a supposedly serious flaw in PDF, there were no details, so therefore it doesn't even count as disclosure of a vulnerability as a whole.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
Even better (i.e. MUCH faster): Sumatra PDF http://blog.kowalczyk.info/software/sumatrapdf/
Foxit is also vulnerable to this, if you RTFA (including the comments made down in the blog). Its apparently not as bad there since you have to interact some with the document (it won't automatically just run), but I wouldn't advertise it as an alternative to prevent this vulnerability.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.