Adobe has released a long-awaited update to its Flash Player that allows users to apply security patches with no prodding.
The background updater, which Adobe announced in a blog post published on Tuesday, is designed to better protect users against malware attacks that exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities in the ubiquitous media player. Over the past few years, organized crime gangs and spy rings have milked such zero-day flaws to surreptitiously install keyloggers and other data-stealing software on vulnerable machines. The new mechanism is intended to reverse that trend by reducing the time it takes for the majority of Flash users to plug critical holes that come under attack.
Up to now, Flash Player has provided notices of available updates and waited until users clicked an OK button before installing them. What's more, Windows users who relied on multiple browsers weren't fully protected until they installed one patch for Internet Explorer and a separate one for most other browsers. (The Chrome browser has Flash integrated into it, so patches are delivered in updates provided by Google automatically.)
Adobe's background updater adopts an approach similar to that of Chrome. It allows Windows users to choose a setting that installs available updates automatically with no prompting. Updates will apply to Flash versions for all browsers other than Chrome, which will continue to bundle a dedicated player.
Automatic updating won't work for releases that require users to change default settings in Flash. That includes version 11.2 released Tuesday, because it changes the way updates are applied to users’ machines. The background updater is currently available only for Windows versions of Flash, but a Mac version is now under development.
"The new background updater will provide a better experience for our customers, and it will allow us to more rapidly respond to zero-day attacks," wrote Peleus Uhley, whose title is Platform Security Strategist on the Adobe Secure Software Engineering Team.
Statistics regularly compiled by Microsoft, Symantec, and others typically rank Flash, along with Oracle's Java framework, as among the most frequently exploited pieces of software. In addition to making Flash easier to update, Adobe is working to improve security by collaborating with browser makers on protective sandboxes that isolate Web content from parts of the operating system that read and modify sensitive files. A version of Chrome code-named Pepper, for instance, will run Flash in the browser's standard sandbox, which is regarded as one of the hardest to bypass. Adobe developers are also working on a Flash sandbox for Firefox. Microsoft, meanwhile, is continuing to improve security mechanisms for its next version of IE.
As things stand now, there is no Flash sandbox for those using Firefox, although the open-source browser does run it and other plugins in a separate process to prevent them from crashing the browser. Both Chrome and IE have various means of containing the Adobe player, but those measures often can be bypassed.
