Adobe: Hacker 'spotlight' will shine on Reader X's sandbox

Computerworld - Adobe's chief security executive said that there will be a bull's-eye on Reader X when the new version ships next month.

Adobe Reader X, slated for release in the next 30 days, will feature Protected Mode, a "sandbox" technology that isolates processes, preventing or at least hindering malware from escaping an application to wreak havoc on the computer.

Security researchers and experts have long called for Adobe to add sandboxing to Reader because of its many vulnerabilities, which have made it a popular route to PC infection. They're getting what they asked for in November.

But Brad Arkin, Adobe's director of security and privacy, acknowledged that Protected Mode won't stop attacks against the popular PDF viewer. In fact, it will probably encourage researchers to redouble their efforts to identify security holes, at least initially.

"We're going to have the spotlight of the security researcher community on us when Reader X launches," Arkin said. "Everyone will want bragging rights to be the first to come up with a working exploit of the sandbox."

But Arkin was confident that Reader X will withstand the inevitable assaults.

"We have a lot of confidence that we've leveraged the positive aspects of the best technologies," he said, referring to the work on sandboxing by both Google and Microsoft that Adobe used to construct its defenses.

In Reader X, all PDF rendering chores will take place within the sandbox, which severely limits the application's privileges in order to cut it off from the rest of the system. Any malicious code packed into a rogue PDF would still run, but it should not be able to escape the isolation chamber.

A separate "broker" decides which functions Reader can conduct outside the sandbox, such as writing to disk or launching an attachment or executable file from within the software.

The key to Protected Mode, Arkin acknowledged, is the broker. Hack the broker, and attackers will still be able to infect machines using rigged PDFs.

"The broker is 13,000 lines of code -- brand-new modern code that's been exhaustively tested and gone through Secure Product Lifecycle," said Arkin, referring to Adobe's development strategy that, like Microsoft's better-known Software Development Lifecycle, mandates that programmers follow security-specific steps to reduce possible vulnerabilities.

"That code has had more security attention than any other like-sized code in the history of the company," Arkin said. "We've had multiple sets of eyeballs on it to make sure we didn't have groupthink going on here."

Adobe tested the broker specifically and the sandbox in general, both inside the company and with a limited number of enterprise customers that use Reader. The company also hired outside researchers, who tried to break out of the sandbox, but Arkin declined to specify the results.