FIRM: capability-based inline mediation of Flash behaviors

The wide use of Flash technologies makes the security risks posed by Flash content an increasingly serious issue. Such risks cannot be effectively addressed by the Flash player, which either completely blocks Flash content's access to web resources or grants it unconstrained access. Efforts to mitigate this threat have to face the practical challenges that Adobe Flash player is closed source, and any changes to it need to be distributed to a large number of web clients. We demonstrate in this paper, however, that it is completely feasible to avoid these hurdles while still achieving fine-grained control of the interactions between Flash content and its hosting page. Our solution is FIRM, a system that embeds an inline reference monitor (IRM) within the web page hosting Flash content. The IRM effectively mediates the interactions between the content and DOM objects, and those between different Flash applications, using the capability tokens assigned by the web designer. FIRM can e...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: ACSAC
• Authors: Zhou Li, XiaoFeng Wang
• Keywords: ACSAC 2010, Flash, Flash Content, Flash Player, Security Privacy