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Playing In The Reader X Sandbox at Black Hat USA 2011

Posted by Mark Yason and Paul Sabanal on July 27, 2011 at 11:22 PM EDT.

Mark Yason here from the IBM X-Force Advanced Research Team.  Just wanted to announce that Paul Sabanal and I will be speaking at the Black Hat USA 2011 conference this coming August in Las Vegas.


We will be talking about the Adobe Reader X sandbox and we are excited to present the results of our research. The first part of our talk will cover the internals of the Reader X sandbox – we will talk about its major components, the data structures that these components use, and we will also talk about the techniques we used that helped us in our research.


The second part of our talk covers the security aspect of the Reader X sandbox – we will discuss its current limitations and weaknesses along with their security implications. We will demonstrate how that without escaping the sandbox, these limitations and weaknesses can be leveraged to conduct an information theft attack. Finally, we will explore possibilities leading to a sandbox escape which includes a discussion of the attack surface in the Reader X broker process.


If you’re interested, please stop by at our talk at Black Hat USA 2011!

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