Topic: Adobe patch thwarts clickjacking attack

[Samker]

Adobe has published an update to its popular Flash Player software, addressing a much-publicised clickjacking flaw.

Clickjacking affects multiple applications (including browsers and media players) and creates a means for hackers to trick prospective marks into unknowingly clicking on a link or dialogue. Adobe Flash Player - specifically the microphone and camera access dialogue - was among the products affected.

Version 10.0.12.36 of Flash Player defends against the attack while also addressing a glitch involving interoperability with Firefox. It deals too with a bug in enforcing cross-domain policies that might be exploited by hackers to bypass security restrictions, as explained in an advisory form Adobe here: http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb08-18.html

The new version of Flash player also introduces a whole raft of new features, focusing on the ability to handle audio files, as explained in our earlier story.

Adobe published a workaround to defend against the clicking flaw last week, promising a patch by the end of the month, so it's actually ahead of schedule in delivering a security fix.

The clickjacking issue rose to prominence after two security researchers, Jeremiah Grossman and Robert "RSnake" Hansen, cancelled a planned presentation on the class of vulnerability due to take place at the AppSec 2008 Conference in New York late last month. This created interest in clickjacking, and undoubtedly spurred a security blogger into creating a proof of concept exploit demo involving Adobe Flash in early October.

This, in turn, prompted Adobe to produce a workaround (temporary defence) and now patch. An overview of the full list of security improvements in the latest version of Flash can be found in an advisory from Secunia here.

(The Register)