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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."
This is a terrible idea. The neighborhood cats are constantly shitting in my sandbox.
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.
Any program I run should be have the option of being sandboxed by the the OS if I so choose.
I mean really, Adobe Reader has become one of the worst PDF readers available. It's slow. It hangs the browser. It's constantly getting attacked. And it's a total pain to keep it updated.
Just get Foxit and be done with it. It's light weight, doesn't hang browsers while opening large PDFs, has a SIGNIFICANTLY better search interface, and so far hasn't been subject to any major attacks/flaws.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
This is pathetic. This program is a "Reader", just that! How hard can it be to fix all of those buffer overflows? Is the source code so horrendously broken that only a sandbox can fix it? What's next? Sandboxing vi ? ls? /dev/null?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Evince works just fine here!
Though it's not linked anywhere, cut-down installs of Adobe Reader can always be obtained from http://get.adobe.com/uk/reader/enterprise/
Yep, true dat. I remember when Adobe Reader first came out, it was the cat's ass - lightweight, did it's job, nothing else. In fact at one time PDFs were used to avoid those infamous MS-Word viruses that spread in the '90's. Now it's suffering from the same feature creep that affects every other (commercial) software vendor - add features or else you don't think you're "adding value". And those new features carry with them all manner of attack vectors and vulnerabilities.
Which is why I don't think vi will suffer the same fate. I'm not an avid follower of it's development, I just use it, but it seems to me that they're keeping it pretty much the way it was intended to be.
-- "In order to have power, I must be taken seriously." -Mojo Jojo
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/reader/win/10.x/10.0.0/
A few language options available, and EXE or MSI format.
soon to come: Virtualized Adobe Reader which runs in it's own kernel space, with GUI, multiuser and multitasking support!
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
Well, you do now ;)
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.
its not that the Reader has buffer overflows underflows etc, it's the fact that the Reader has so many built in functions such as embedded flash movies and these have their own flaws.. I think adobe should trim or design a lightweight Reader that has less of these features making it more secure!
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
I absolutely hate it when the PDF loads into the browser rather than the PDF software. All your menus mess up, you can't fully use the PDF software, you can't fully use your browser, the PDF software hogs your browser up.
I blame Internet Explorer.
Ever since von Neumann came up with this crazy idea of program and data being the same, guaranteeing that something that just manipulates data doesn't also execute code has been nontrivial.
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.
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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.
Doing this would be an admission that Reader is insecure. Adobe would never go this route.
And sandboxing the damn thing isn't an admission of crappiness?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
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
"Installing this program will take up 415.8 MB of space". Seriously? WTF Adobe, this reads PDFs AND DOESN'T DO ANYTHING ELSE, are you trying to make it as bloated as possible?
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
Does the Windows installer still place a shortcut to the application on your desktop? Amazingly useful for people who would like to open the reader without any document in it, so you can stare at a grey window, right there on your desktop!
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
The sandbox idea is great.
Adobe couldn't fix all the security flaws in their program, so they wrote another program to put their program in.
Fortunately the new porogram has no security flaws.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce