Google Chrome already has sandboxed flash player, Adobe now trying to bring that technology to other browsers, yesterday Adobe launched public beta of Flash Player Sandbox (aka “protected mode) for Firefox browser. Flash Player protected mode protects users from attacks of malicious SWF files against Flash Player running on Firefox 4.0 or later on Windows Vista and higher Windows platforms.
Sandboxed Flash Player for Firefox
Design of Flash Player Sandbox is similar to that of used in Adobe Reader X Protected Mode and follows the same practical windows sandboxing approach. You can also compare this technology to Protected Mode in Google Chrome and Office 2010 protected view.
Adobe says in their blog post: “Like the Adobe Reader X sandbox, Flash Player will establish a low integrity, highly restricted process that must communicate through a broker to limit its privileged activities. The sandboxed process is restricted with the same job limits and privilege restrictions as the Adobe Reader Protected Mode implementation” .
Adobe notes their Sandboxing technology is very effective in protecting users, since the launch of November 2010 they’ve not seen single successful exploit against Adobe Reader X. They’re hoping to see similar results for Flash Player Sandbox for Firefox also which is will be released later this year.
Flash Player Protected mode for Firefox
Protected mode is enabled by default for Flash player in Firefox.With protected mode on – flash files are displayed and run inside sandbox.
If the sandbox is enabled, you will see two additional processes as children of plugin-container.exe in Task Manager, both named "FlashPlayerPlugin_11_2_300_130.exe". These are the broker and sandbox processes.
If the sandbox is disabled, you will see the regular Firefox.exe and plugin-container.exe processes running in the Task Manager.
You can download Beta version of Flash Player Sandbox for Firefox from here. You’re not recommended to install this version on a working system, you need to uninstall previous flash player installed on your Computer before installing this version.