Adobe tackles Hacking Team zero-day vulnerability | Hacker News Reader

Adobe tackles Hacking Team zero-day vulnerability

zdnet.com

21 pointswglb10 comments

Adobe tends to catch a lot of flak with regard to security... and a lot of it is well-deserved. It's nice to see that they saw a problem, and immediately began work on a fix -- for those people with Flash still enabled, it'll be nice to have a security hotfix :)

An impressive turnaround from "we use 3DES-ECB as a password hashing function" to "we identified and fixed 0days in our product fast enough to meet a project zero deadline".

Flash should have been AFL-Fuzzed (Or something similar) a long time ago and this should have been found proactively. Flash hasn't been on my computer for ages and I urge you to do the same thing.

Apologies from straying from the topic at hand but "Fizzbuzzed"? That's a verb now? And its meaning is nothing to do with typical hiring process that FizzBuzz is popular for?

Sorry, tech-term-mixup in my brain. I meant AFL-Fuzzed ofcourse. (http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/afl/)

AFL-Fuzz is great, but it isn't going to find everything. Some things I can think of that might make finding this difficult with afl-fuzz:

* Flash is a scripting language. It's very hard for a fuzzer with no domain knowledge (like AFL-fuzz) to fuzz language-level constructs, since the vast majority of random inputs are trivially invalid.

* Flash is typically embedded in a larger program like a browser; this makes it much more expensive to test (browsers have long startup times, and are very slow when run under the kind of instrumentation needed to detect things like use after free bugs)

Unfortunately there's no silver bullet for finding vulnerabilities...

While I agree with this, Adobe does have the knowledge and skills to hook a fuzzer into their Flash source on sandboxes and vm's, and basically let a fuzzer rip. When you build one of the most installed pieces of software in the world, you should take that responsibility.

AFL works from the outside (and even accepts certain keywords to "hint" the fuzzer)...so really anyone could run it against Flash having it generate SWF's. But it'd probably take a really long time to find anything.

Check out this: http://googleonlinesecurity.blogspot.com/2011/08/fuzzing-at-...

They found 400 crashes.

There's a typo in the article:

> user-after-free (UAF)

Should be "use-after-free" (no r on use).

Edit: Actually looks like the typo was in the origin Trend Micro blog post and the author just copied the typo into their article 1:1.

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