No Sign of Reader Fix As Adobe Patches ColdFusion

Adobe released a patch addressing vulnerabilities in its ColdFusion Web application development platform. However, it still has not released a fix for the critical vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat the company promised last week.

The vulnerability exists in ColdFusion version 9.01, 9.0, 8.0.1 and 8.0 running on Windows, Mac OS X and Unix, Adobe said in its security update.

XSS blocking

The vulnerabilities could lead to a cross-site scripting attack in ColdFusion Remote Development Services and in custom tags used to develop dynamic forms, according to Adobe.

“Adobe categorises this as an important update and recommends that users apply the latest update for their product installation,” the company said in the advisory.

The company issued a security advisory last week warning of a critical zero-day vulnerability in Reader and Acrobat that was actively being exploited in the wild. The flaw was due to a corruption in the U3D memory, a technology that Reader and Acrobat relies on to interact with 3D objects. An attacker could create a malicious PDF file containing a 3D object to crash computer systems or potentially take over a targeted system, according the Adobe’s security advisory.

Several security researchers found samples of an attack email and malicious PDF files and concluded the attackers were targeting defence contractors. The exploits was “prevalent enough” to have Adobe break its normal cycle and promise an out-of-band patch, Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, told eWEEK. The patch was for Adobe Reader 9.x for Windows since Adobe Reader X was able to block the malicious code from executing because of its sandboxing technology.

It would be “better” if administrators could update users to Adobe Reader X, Kandek said, noting this was the third vulnerability disclosed this year that Reader X successfully blocked.

Android patch

Adobe also updated AIR and Flash Player for Android. Despite announcing on 9 November that the company will cease Flash development for the Android mobile platform to focus on HTML 5, Flash Player for Android 11.1.111.5 is available on the Android Market. The updates do not support the latest version of the operating system, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and it was not clear when that would be available.

“This release includes no major features but enhancements and bug fixes related to security, stability, performance, and device compatibility,” Adobe specified.

The update fixes issues related to video streaming on the Samsung Galaxy S II where audio plays without video, 1080p video for Nvidia Tegra 3-based devices and video playback for video decoding, according to the release notes. Known issues include Android failing to prioritise incoming calls so audio keeps playing even after a call and failing to prevent the enter key from working inside a multi-line text input field.

Only two weeks earlier, Adobe patched a vulnerability in the Flex SDK on all operation systems that would have exposed applications to a cross-site scripting attack. The bug, if exploited, would have allowed attackers to take over applications built using a vulnerable version of the SDK. The Adobe Flex SDK is used to create flash applets for web applications.