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Safari for OS X Mavericks includes Flash Player sandboxing

Safari for OS X Mavericks includes Flash Player sandboxing

By Anupam Saxena | Updated: 24 October 2013 14:38 IST

Adobe's popular Flash Player utility that allows users to watch videos and browse interactive animated content, has now been made more secure in Apple's Safari web browser on OS X Mavericks, Apple's new desktop operating system, via sandboxing.

Adobe and Apple have worked together to restrict Flash Player's access to the operating system in a bid to make it more secure, as the move will prevent malware attacks that take the browser route to reach out to the user's computer.

Sandboxing essentially puts restrictions on the manner a particular application interacts with the system's operating system, isolating potentially dangerous code.

Talking about the update in a blog post, Peleus Uhley, Platform Security Strategist at Adobe, said that with this week's release of Safari in OS X Mavericks, Flash Player will now be protected by an OS X App Sandbox.

"For the technically minded, this means that there is a specific com.macromedia.Flash Player.plugin.sb file defining the security permissions for Flash Player when it runs within the sandboxed plugin process. As you might expect, Flash Player's capabilities to read and write files will be limited to only those locations it needs to function properly," the post explained.

The post also added that the sandbox now limits Flash Player's local connections to device resources and inter-process communication (IPC) channels and networking privileges, to prevent unnecessary connection capabilities.

Apple had earlier started blocking old versions of the Flash Player, after security vulnerabilities were reported, earlier this year, to prevent any malware attacks. With the sandboxing in place, the browser has become more secure than it was earlier , when it comes to browsing Flash content.

It's worth pointing out that Google's Chrome browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox have already deployed sandboxing on Windows.

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