ID: IRCNE2012111677
Date: 2012-11-18
According to "computerworld", google this week announced it had shipped a stronger Flash Player sandbox for the OS X version of Chrome.
Chrome 23, which launched Nov. 6, completed Google's efforts to ditch the aged NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) Flash plug-in for one built to Google's own PPAPI (Pepper Plugin Application Programming Interface) standard.
By porting Flash Player to PPAPI, Google's engineers were able to place the Adobe plug-in in a "sandbox" as robust as the one that protects Chrome itself.
A sandbox is an anti-exploit technology that isolates processes on a computer, preventing or at least hindering malware from exploiting an unpatched vulnerability, escalating privileges and planting attack code on the system.
"With this release [of Chrome 23], Flash Player is now fully sandboxed in Chrome on all of our desktop platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS," said Scott Hess, a Google software engineer, in a Tuesday blog post.
According to Web metrics company Net Applications, Chrome accounted for 18.6% of the world's browsers used in October, putting it in third place behind IE and Firefox. Rival measurement company StatCounter, however, has long had a much different take on Chrome. Last month, it put Google's share at 34.8%, making it the world's most-used browser.
Google has been bundling Flash with its Chrome browser for more than two years, one way it has tried to stifle attacks of the frequently-vulnerable software. Chrome 23 also introduced the "Do Not Track" (DNT) privacy feature; Google was the last major browser maker to add DNT support.
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