A string of weaponized attacks targeting Adobe's Flash media player—including three in the past 10 days—has kept software engineers scrambling to fix the underlying vulnerabilities that make the exploits so dangerous. Fortunately, they have also been busy making structural changes to the way the program interacts with computer operating systems to significantly reduce the damage that can result not only from those specific attacks but entire classes of similar ones.
At the moment, the defenses are fully implemented only in the Flash version included in Google Chrome, having made their debut earlier this week. One of the two mitigations is available in other versions of Flash, and the remaining one is expected to be added to other browsers in August. Had they been widely available earlier, they likely would have blunted the effects of at least some of the three most recent zero-day vulnerabilities, which were leaked following the thorough hack of Hacking Team, the malware-as-a-service provider that catered to governments around the world. To block entire classes of new exploits, Adobe engineers, with the help of their counterparts at Google's Project Zero team, have made two key changes.
The first, which is currently available only in Chrome, is a new partition added to the heap, which is a large pool of computer memory. The partition isolates different types of memory contents, typically known as objects, from each other so one can't be used to hijack or otherwise tamper with another. Heap partitioning has long been a mainstay in Chrome and other browsers. Now it's a key defense in Flash.
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