Adobe AIR and Security

Friday, April 4, 2008 by Mistlee


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04.04.08

Adobe AIR and Security

By Brajeshwar Oinam

I was reading an Adobe article about an upcoming security update for Flash Player in this month of April, 2008. The Flash Player security update provides further mitigations for issues listed in the December 2007 Security Bulletin ABSP07-20 for DNS rebinding and cross-domain policy file vulnerabilities, and Security Advisory APSA07-06 for cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in SWFs.

Well, the Adobe AIR shares technology with Flash Player and thus it is likely that Adobe AIR too will get an update with these fixes. This prompted me to do a rather lengthy article on a related topic — Adobe AIR and Security — which have been lingering in my to-do list for quite a while. Lengthy but this article will still fall short of all the details of AIR security as it is a big subject in itself.

What is affected? What should AIR developer care about?

From AIR perspective, this is a very minute update and is likely that most existing AIR applications will continue to work without requiring any change. Nonetheless, certain applications that may be affected which are subject to the same security restrictions in the updated Flash Player;

• SWF or HTML content loaded from outside of the application (for example, from a web URL or from a local directory)

• SWF content hosted within HTML in an AIR application

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If your AIR application is using affected content (non-application SWF/HTML; SWF in HTML) to do any of the following, consult Adobe's Flash Player 9 security update article;

• Use sockets or XMLSockets, regardless of the domain the SWF is connecting to

• Use addRequestHeader or URLRequest.requestHeaders in any network API call when sending or loading data cross-domain or Rely on cross-domain access to web services, where HTTP headers are used to interact with the service

• Uses SWFs that are exported for Flash Player 7 or below that communicate with the hosting HTML by any means

• Uses '"javascript:'" through network APIs to communicate outside a SWF

Installing/Upgrading the new AIR should just replace your current AIR version. The application descriptor does not require change. Any other Applications that do not rely on these types of content will not be affected by the security update. Specifically, all-SWF and all-HTML applications where all content files are loaded from the application's directory will remain unaffected. It may be noted that, the AIR runtime periodically checks to see if any updates are available. Once an updated version is detected, the AIR runtime will download it in the background and automatically install it.

Continue reading this article.

About the Author:
Brajeshwar is an ace digerati and an ardent believer of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), he envisions pushing the technical envelope time and again for the betterment of commercial and practical applications.

http://www.brajeshwar.com/
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