When Adobe announced that they would combine Flash and Acrobat, two heavily attacked and common software components, into one package, I was concerned. Combining two big attack surfaces into one bigger one seemed like a dangerous proposition.
The argument may or may not make sense, but for Vista users Acrobat 9 (now with Flash!) will be much, much harder to compromise than in the past. As Microsoft Security Software Engineer Robert Hensing reveals, Acrobat 9 on Vista opts in to DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization). These defensive feature will mean that even if—actually, I should say “when”—new vulnerabilities are found in Acrobat 9, they will be much harder to exploit in real world cases because DEP and ASLR impede a very large percentage of the exploit techniques..
Technically, opting in to these features should mean just adding some linker switches, but for a company like Adobe it can mean a lot more work than that. It might have meant changing tools and it certainly meant doing a lot more testing and probably more debugging. DEP and ASLR are likely to uncover other types of bugs in software that might have appeared benign in the past, but which will throw exceptions with DEP and ASLR enabled. They force you to write better code.
So hats off and some applause for Adobe for doing the right thing by their Vista users. They will be a lot safer. Even the XP SP2 and SP3 users will be safer if they turn on DEP.
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July 22nd, 2008 at 8:51
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