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Adobe Acrobat PDF viewers contains flaw

Michel   on 27 March 2003 - 14:17 · 8 comments & 2985 views

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This may seem old news and was indeed already discovered in 2001, but even though Adobe has been notified about it, no fix exists today. [Michel]

Acrobat plug-ins can be digitally signed to determine whether they should be loaded by Adobe Acrobat Reader at startup. This digital signature mechanism is not cryptographically strong and allows other potentially-malicious plug-in code to pretend to be certified by Adobe and be executed by Acrobat Reader even when in 'Certified Plug-ins Only' mode.

The digital signature mechanism used by Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Acrobat Reader to determine if a plug-in is certified ("Reader enabled") only checks the Portable Executable (PE) header of the plug-in file (dynamic library). This cryptographic weakness can be used to make unsigned plug-ins appear to be certified by Adobe and loaded by Adobe Acrobat Reader regardless of the 'Certified Plug-ins Only' setting.

View: CERT/CC Vulnerability Note VU#549913 : Contains the full details including a workaround
News source: WebWereld (Dutch)

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