Adobe Flash Player sandboxed in Safari on OS X Mavericks

After having worked with Google, Microsoft and Mozilla to incorporate an app sandbox for Flash Player, Adobe has announced that Safari in the recently released OS X Mavericks will also include one.

“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,” Adobe platform security strategist Peleus Uhley explained in a blog post.

“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 sandbox also limits Flash Player’s local connections to device resources and inter-process communication (IPC) channels. Finally, the sandbox limits Flash Player’s networking privileges to prevent unnecessary connection capabilities.”

The move was aimed at protecting Mac users against attacks that target vulnerabilities in browser plug-ins so that they could infect Mac machines with malware.

The most prominent example of this type of attack against Mac users was the Flashback Trojan malware-delivery campaign that started in 201.

As a reminder: earlier this year, Apple has decided to disable older versions of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in and urge users to update it to the latest version.