Advisory:
"The new Flash player adds network functions!"
Details:
With a minor amount of fanfare "binary socket" support has been
added to Flash Player 9 / ActionScript 3.0. The Flash sandbox model
is primarily focused on preventing modifications to the local system,
and thus there are many ways to bypass the only-connect-back-upstream
and port<1024 limitations on the SWF applet Socket() class. A
(potentially malicious) server can override the limit with a
cross domain policy file on the server, or it can be overriden
locally at the player with a global setting/policy change, or
by configuring the applet as trusted.
Adobe has a paper on flash security configuration at:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/flash_player_9_security.pdf
The potential for network misuse possible in Flash just went up
several orders of magnitude, and as the Adobe site triumphantly
proclaims, it's apparently in use at 97.3% of networked computers.
I'll avoid some of the more exotic scenarios, lest they give
anyone some bad ideas - and leave this caveat at this warning.
Audited the trusted Flash applets on your system lately?
Forewarned is Forearmed.
cheers,
--dr
--
World Security Pros. Cutting Edge Training, Tools, and Techniques
Tokyo, Japan November 27-30 2006 http://pacsec.jp
pgpkey http://dragos.com/ kyxpgp
Received on Oct 12 2006
Intro
