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Adobe Launches Sandboxed Reader X
CWmike writes "Adobe on Wednesday released Reader X, the next version of its popular software that includes a 'sandbox' designed to protect users from PDF attacks. Protected Mode is Adobe's response to experts' demands that the company beef up the security of Reader, which is aggressively targeted by attackers. Calling the sandbox a 'new advancement' in protective measures, Brad Arkin, Adobe's director of security and privacy, admitted it will not stymie every attack. But he argued it will help. 'Even if exploitable security vulnerabilities are found by an attacker, Adobe Reader Protected Mode will help prevent the attacker from writing files or installing malware on potential victims' computers,' Arkin said in a post to a company blog late on Thursday."
Acrobat Reader does this stupid thing where it opens the Reader application to show me an error message then shuts that down and opens the document in the browser. During this, any other Acrobat Reader instances opened will be automatically closed and it's a 50/50 shot whether the current document actually shows up properly in the browser.
Whilst an improvement I'll take a good bet it's still a memory and processor hog. I'd advise people to use Foxit but honestly these days it isn't much better and includes adware.
I personally use Sumatra at home, at work (I work at a print company so we receive lots of PDFs) we use Adobe Reader but I've made sure to disable JS by default in it. It's amazing just how many attacks disabling JS stops. The really impressive thing is that of the massive amount of PDFs work receives we very rarely have one that requires JS. The unfortunate reality of PDFs though is that Adobes Reader is the best renderer, whilst say with Sumatra or Foxit may get 5% rendered incorrectly that's a lot of needless support calls and hassle.
Wow way to screw over plugin users. Instead of fixing the bugs in their software they just block out a whole lot of stuff.... I work for a software company that uses a plugin to connect to the reader and have real time bookmark following between the reader and our software. With this new "enhancement" our link to the reader is completely broken. We either have to tell our clients to disable the protected mode and go back to the same broken reader or our clients can stop using our features... Thank's Adobe
Any program I run should be have the option of being sandboxed by the the OS if I so choose.
I totally agree. The OS should provide hooks to applications to spawn sandboxes. I know that Apple already has this in OSX since I use it in Xgrid to sandbox jobs. They have not documented the configuration yet but it's easy enough to guess. It works well. It would be cool if they could take it a step further to the thread level so you could share memory but imprison the resources a thread can use.
I have found the tricky part of this is that many things you think you can turn off are not so easy. For example, many applications need to access preference files so they need read write to the preferences directory. Your code may not be actually writing to that directory but calling a persistence library function for dictionaries and it may require you to allow access to the whole directory not just a file.
In other cases your app may call other things that expect certain access. For example, when you run the command "ls -l" in a shell, it accesses /etc/passwd in order to put names to the process UIDs. When you ask for the time or date, various localization files in /etc are consulted. When you call open/save dialogs some of these appear to try to inventory the mounted drives in /Volumes (which you can see because the drives spin up).
It's hard to anticipate these things because libraries and APIs that you use have legacy expectations of their privileges. In order for the code to grant that access to the API, the code itself has to have it too. The only work-around for that is to go back to the evil days of Set UID root scripts (like the command "ps" still has).
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
yes, and the 3rd directory down in this link sums it up pretty well
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobat/
Index of /pub/adobe/acrobat/
Name Size Date Modified
[parent directory]
all/ 8/26/08 1:00:00 AM
js/ 1/25/07 12:00:00 AM
junk1/ 2/12/04 12:00:00 AM
mac/ 3/10/09 1:00:00 AM
misc/ 5/31/01 1:00:00 AM
unix/ 1/20/00 12:00:00 AM
win/ 8/6/08 1:00:00 AM
Sandboxing vi ?
Is vi a link to vim on your machine? If so, it might be worth sandboxing; there has been at least one security hole in vim in the last year or so that has caused a buffer overflow that is exploitable by maliciously crafted text files.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Gives you ample time to uninstall the McAfee Security Scan Plus that gets installed without your permission.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
Windows New Technology => WNT
(V+1)(M+1)(S+1) == WNT
Cutler didn't even pretend it was new.
Back in the day, it was realized that Display Postscript could be exploited. This was demonstrated in an amusing way with encapsulated postscript files which, when NeXTSTEP's Mail program tried to render them in-line in a message, executed code that would cause your screen to "melt", or would grab all the windows on your screen and spin them around until you clicked the mouse.
Unfortunately, Postscript could also operate on files...
So NeXT added a default "secure DPS context" in which Postscript would execute with the problematic instructions disabled.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA