Adobe has just recently released the beta version of their sandboxed Flash Player, in hopes for fewer exploits.
“The design of this sandbox is similar to what Adobe delivered with Adobe Reader X Protected Mode and follows the same Practical Windows Sandboxing approach,” said Peleus Uhley, platform security strategist at Adobe, in a blog post on Monday. “Like the Adobe Reader X sandbox, Flash Player will establish a low integrity, highly restricted process that must communicate through a broker to limit its privileged activities.”
What sandboxing does, is it creates a virtual chunk of memory that is used to isolate the program from your hard drive. Therefore any programs running in this virtual memory cannot touch your system.
Adobe chose to apply sandboxing in Adobe Reader back in 2010 to counter the multitude of exploits that aimed the product and its users. The engineering was assembled into Adobe Reader X (10.0) and is based on the same sandboxing precepts that Google applied when developing their Chrome browser.
Vital Flash Player vulnerabilities have regularly been exploited to taint computers with malware during the preceding several years. Along with Java, browser exploits and Adobe Reader, Flash Player is among the most attacked software package applications, because its vulnerabilities can commonly be exploited by merely visiting a malevolent website.
