Worth Reading: Escape from Adobe's sandbox

Adobe Reader X runs in a sandbox at a very restricted privilege level. Important system calls are supposed to be handled by a special broker process that will subject them to extensive testing. However, a small design flaw allows attackers to escape from this sandbox and execute arbitrary code – despite having both ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomisation) and DEP (Data Execution Prevention). As described by Guillaume Delugré, the broker process is at the heart of the exploit as it uses a memory page allocated via VirtualAllocEx to store the overwritten code of system calls which have been redirected to the broker....

June 25, 2012 Â· 1 min Â· 212 words

New automated sandbox for Android malware

ISC Diary: One of the things that I’ve been working on lately is building an automated malware analysis environment to handle Android malware similar to the one I built for Windows malware. I’m not quite there yet, but I was quite pleased to here about the new service being offered by the folks at Die Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. This is still a research project, so if you choose to use it, be understanding....

March 4, 2012 Â· 1 min Â· 110 words

Sandbox

In computer security, a sandbox is a security mechanism for separating running programs. It is often used to execute untested code, or untrusted programs from unverified third-parties, suppliers and untrusted users. I Recommend Sandboxie for Daily use. The sandbox typically provides a tightly-controlled set of resources for guest programs to run in, such as scratch space on disk and memory. Network access, the ability to inspect the host system or read from input devices are usually disallowed or heavily restricted....

January 13, 2009 Â· 3 min Â· 458 words