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Comment by dguido | Hacker News Reader

You think that any other software you use is any better? Flash gets it rough because it's widely used and independent of the browser (for the most part).

If you're running an update to date flash, that means you're probably running it in a sandbox and probably have silent auto updates turned on. That's good enough for most people.

If you're the kind of person that's going to get specifically targeted, then you should not only reconsider running flash on your computer, but any other program written in an unsafe language.

Or, you know, segregate your data.

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"You think that any other software you use is any better?"

I certainly HOPE most software I use can do better than this: http://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-53/pr...

To be certain, Flash gets a lot of attention because of its install base - but it's been a never-ending FOUNTAIN of RCE bugs for much of the last decade.

Most software that's as complex as Flash is probably similarly full of bugs. Most of those vulnerabilities reek of huge development teams toiling over a codebase whose foundation was written in the late 90s and had features and fixes duct taped ever since.

"Probably"? Complex as Flash? Whatever it have a big or small team, was started in the late 90s or whatever it causes problems now. So use whatever excuses you like, Flash is still a security concern with opportunity for more 0-day exploits(just one firm have two in the drawer, how many more there are?).

Do Chrome and Safari have as bad a track record?

Flash has been insecure since originally launched.

no, maybe not as bad, but JIT can be played pretty hard. I think the difference is that they are better structured and more transparent. I would definitely NOT put my hands on flash code, must be a mess!

In a way, yes, they do. Chrome pushes out a dozen or more fixes for remotely exploitable vulnerabilities every 2 weeks.

No they don't. Chrome is designed from the ground up for security. It has the same number of bugs as other software of it's size but the type of bugs are much less severe.

Compare FF, Safari, IE, Chrome. Same number of bugs per yet but Chrome has 10x less code execution bugs (ie, 10x less likely for your machine to be owned by unknown bugs)

http://i.imgur.com/rVgu7Fs.png

The chart you just linked (which doesn't show a timescale) shows Chrome with over 300 exploitable bugs. I doubt the denial of service label, that just usually means that a bug wasn't fully investigated. So, again, how is this different from Flash? Chrome is riddled with vulnerabilities (and Safari is too).

Flash runs in a low-priv environment is nearly every major browser, includes application-specific exploit mitigations, and it silently auto-updates, just like Chrome. It's all a matter of the Flash install base: it's in 90%+ of browsers and it's running the same-ish codebase in all of them, making it a relatively stable platform to develop exploits for. That's it! It's more a factor of market share and not "security."

Every document reader, HTML renderer, JavaScript engine, browser, media player, etc that you use is the same -- a house of cards built on poor memory management :-/.

  > Chrome pushes out a dozen or more fixes
  > for remotely exploitable vulnerabilities
  > every 2 weeks.

That equates to 288 remotely exploitable vulnerabilities in Chrome per year.

Here is a chart from the same source with a timeline of sorts: http://www.cvedetails.com/product/15031/Google-Chrome.html?v...

Your statement about Chrome is clearly way off, and that's what your parent was addressing. He never said Chrome was bug-free. And he was right to say that Chrome is way ahead of the other browsers (according to these stats, at least).

Edit: those stats show Chrome is better in terms of CVE severity, not number of annual CVEs.

I don't think the classification of most of those DoS bugs are correct. I also don't think there's a big difference between 100 vulns per year and 300 vulns per year. You go fishing and you find some each time.

> a house of cards built on poor memory management :-/.

Shit, this is the most accurate description of modern software that I've seen so far.

data: I grabbed all 500+ records and counted, by month, those with severity 10 (column 10) and severity >= 7 (column 7). Rows is the # of cve records for that month.

it's not awesome

   month   rows 10  7
   2015-07   35 28 29
   2015-06   14  7  7
   2015-05   17 10 10
   2015-04   22 19 19
   2015-03   11  7  9
   2015-02   19 19 19
   2015-01   12  9 11
   2014-12    6  5  5
   2014-11   19 16 18
   2014-10    3  3  3
   2014-09   12 11 12
   2014-08    8  7  7
   2014-07    3  0  2
   2014-06    6  1  3
   2014-05    5  0  5
   2014-04    4  1  2
   2014-03    4  2  2
   2014-02    4  3  4
   2014-01    2  2  2
   [...]

2015 has not been kind to them, but it's been a continuous trickle of remote severity 10s every month for a year and a half

truncated because it took too much space; full results: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/763e28612b74d3a1817a

NB: only months with at least one cve event show up, but given adobe's focus on security, it wasn't really necessary to fill in months with 0 events to get the point across

download each screen full of results from the cve site into a single directory and run this script: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/990bfe126d273ef84134

Vulnerabilities increase and usage decreases. I wonder if an economically sensible decision should be to EOL Flash soon. Are they still doing any money out of it?

I answer to myself because I just read this http://www.theverge.com/2015/7/13/8948459/adobe-flash-insecu... from Facebook's CSO.

"It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date for Flash and to ask the browsers to set killbits on the same day. — Alex Stamos (@alexstamos) July 12, 2015"

Flash gets it rough because it's horribly-written software full of security holes. It's demonstrably worse than most anything else out there.

Every piece of software you use is on a constant month-to-month patch train. Chrome, Windows, Firefox, Quicktime, Adium, hell even OpenSSL updates for security-critical bugs about once a month now. Flash is nothing special. All your software is insecure.

Flash "auto updates" are anything but.

On Windows, you get a pop-up to update manually, which just sends you to their website so you need to download and run the installer by yourself.

If you don't update manually, Flash will wait 45 days before triggering an automatic update. I never waited that long, so I don't know whether it's "silent" or not.

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