Over the last few years, Adobe has protected our Flash Player customers through a technique known as sandboxing. Thus far, we have worked with Google, Microsoft and Mozilla on deploying sandboxes for their respective browsers. Most recently, we have worked with Apple to protect Safari users on OS X. With this week’s release of Safari in OS X Mavericks, Flash Player will now be protected by an OS X App Sandbox.
For the technically minded, this means that there is a specific com.macromedia.Flash Player.plugin.sb file defining the security permissions for Flash Player when it runs within the sandboxed plugin process. As you might expect, Flash Player’s capabilities to read and write files will be limited to only those locations it needs to function properly. The sandbox also limits Flash Player’s local connections to device resources and inter-process communication (IPC) channels. Finally, the sandbox limits Flash Player’s networking privileges to prevent unnecessary connection capabilities.
By providing this extra layer of protection to Safari users on OS X Mavericks, we can make it one step harder to exploit our mutual customers. The result is that customers can still view Flash Player content while benefiting from these added security protections. We’d like to thank the Apple security team for working with us to deliver this solution.
