Adobe Patches ‘PWN To OWN’ Bug in Flash Player

Adobe Systems Tuesday plugged the Flash Player hole used by a hacker two weeks ago to take down a Windows Vista machine and claim a $5,000 prize in the “PWN To OWN” exploit challenge.

Adobe’s update to Flash Player — the popular program and browser plug-in used to view online content — patched seven vulnerabilities, including several that could be used by attackers to hijack machines running the flawed software. Among the seven was the one used to break into a Fujitsu notebook during the hacker contest sponsored by 3Com’s TippingPoint, which operates a bug bounty program called Zero Day Initiative.

Last week, Adobe claimed it had known about the Flash bug before it was used by Shane Macaulay of Security Objectives to hack one of the laptops up for grabs at CanSecWest, and would add a fix for it to a previously scheduled update this month.

Adobe had announced the April update about four weeks ago, but had left the timeline vague, saying only that it would refresh Flash sometime during the month.

The majority of the patches applied to Flash Player quashed bugs in how the software handled .swf files, the proprietary Shockwave Flash format. One of the .swf vulnerabilities had been reported to Adobe back in December 2007 by Google researcher Rich Cannings, who pointed out the format could be used to launch cross-site scripting attacks, which are commonly deployed by identity thieves and phishers.

Earlier, Adobe had issued updates to its Web developer tools that crank out .swf files, and told Web operators and site designers to make changes to their pages before it released yesterday’s end-user update. If they didn’t get rid of the older .swf files, they risked users being unable to access Flash content on their sites, Adobe warned.

Sun to Tout Hosting Platform

Sun will discuss on Thursday a research and development project intended to provide a hosting platform for delivering Internet-based services.

Called Project Caroline, the technology is on the agenda of a Sun Labs Open House taking place at Sun offices in Menlo Park, California. The platform comprises a programmatically configurable pool of virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources, according to Sun.

The Project Caroline Web page states that the project is designed to serve an emerging market of small and medium-sized SaaS providers.

“Anticipating needs driven by new SaaS business models and processes, Project Caroline helps SaaS providers develop services rapidly using high-level programming languages like the Java programming language, Ruby, Python, and Perl to update in-production services frequently and to automatically flex their use of platform resources to match changing runtime demands,” the Web page states.

Services can programmatically allocate, monitor, and control virtualized compute, storage, and networking resources via Project Caroline. Interfaces are featured for managing platform resources.

Developers can build services that update and flex platform resources usage. Project Caroline resources are exposed via high-level abstractions, including virtual machines, networks, and network-accessible file systems and databases. A horizontally scaled pool of distributed resources is presented as a single system to provide developers with a unified platform for allocating and controlling resources.

Also on the Open House agenda are OMS, pertaining to a royalty-free media system; Project Live, approaching software distribution and configuration by combining the firmware model with customization; and the Lively Kernel project for Web programming.

Other agenda items include: Project Wonderland, an open-source toolkit for building 3D virtual worlds for business and education collaboration; Project Darkstar, which is a gaming server; and Project MiRTLE (Mixed Reality Teaching and Learning Environment).

Yahoo Adds Video to Flickr

Yahoo has added support for video to its photo sharing site Flickr.

Yahoo wants users to start sharing videos, shot by still cameras, camcorders and camera phones, as well as photos, and Video on Flickr provides an easy solution for consumers, according to the company.

Video can be up to 90 seconds long, and no more than 150M bytes in size. To upload video you have to be a Flickr Pro user, but everyone can watch.

Users can upload videos directly from mobile phones, and integrate videos and photos into a stream.

There is also an API for third-party developers to create programs or services using authorized video submitted to Flickr.

Whether it will be able to compete with Youtube remains to be seen, but Yahoo thinks there is a huge untapped market of which it can take advantage.

More than 40 percent of consumers between 18 and 44 are capturing personal video clips with their digital cameras, but they are not taking advantage of Web sites to effectively share their videos.

Fifty-five percent of respondents to a survey commissioned by Yahoo said they merely play back video clips for their friends on their camera device or PC, and 20 percent don’t share these clips at all.

Mozilla Fixes 10 Firefox Flaws, Half Seen as ‘Critical’

Mozilla patched 10 vulnerabilities, half of them marked “critical,” in its open-source browser as it updated Firefox to version 2.0.0.13. The new Mozilla Messaging spin-off, however, was not able to provide a matching update to its Thunderbird e-mail client, which shares five of the Firefox flaws that were fixed.

Mozilla’s six advisories spelled out five Firefox bugs marked “critical,” three tagged “high” and one each “moderate” and “low.”

“There’s a little bit here to interest most everyone,” said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. “The bulletins claim no favor in the many types of vulnerabilities typically associated with browsers.”

Among the critical flaws were a pair that could be exploited to crash the browser or its JavaScript engine, and perhaps do more. “Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code,” Mozilla wrote in the advisory pegged as 2008-15.

Mozilla also patched potential identity leaks, spoofing bugs and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in 2.0.0.13. But the fix that caught Storms’ eye was detailed by 2008-18, a fix for LiveConnect, a feature that harks back to Firefox’s predecessor, Netscape Navigator. LiveConnect lets Java applets call a Web page’s embedded JavaScript, or JavaScript access the Java runtime libraries, and is used by both Firefox and Apple Inc.’s Safari 3 browser.

“Sun has updated the Java Runtime Environment with a fix for this problem. Mozilla has also added a fix to LiveConnect to protect users who don’t have the latest version of Java,” Mozilla said in the advisory.

“Here we have Firefox putting out a mitigation step for a bug in Java,” said Storms. “It’s a welcomed addition when one vendor can help out another.”