NEWS & EVENTS

2006 Press Releases

Vulnerabilities Discovered in Adobe Flash Player Plugin Allow Potential Attackers to Send Arbitrary HTTP Requests fromUsers' Browsers, Warns Vulnerability Management Company Rapid7

Rapid7 Reports Two Adobe Flash Vulnerabilities That Can Be Exploited with Specific Browser/Operating System Combinations and Potentially Used to Perform Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Attacks

Boston - October 17, 2006 - Two vulnerabilities found in Adobe Flash Player provide opportunity to attackers to send arbitrary HTTP requests from an unsuspecting user’s browser, reports Rapid7 LLC in a security advisory published today (see Rapid7 Advisory R7-0026: HTTP Header Injection Vulnerabilities in the Flash Player Plugin). These vulnerabilities could be used in concert with cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities to steal cookies or other private information. Adobe Flash Player version 9.0.16 for Windows and version 7.0.63 for Linux, as well as earlier versions, are affected.

The exploits can be carried out through the vulnerabilities when Flash is used with the following browser/operating system combinations:

Internet Explorer (IE) 6 Service Pack 2 (IE 6, Security Version 1) for Windows (with Flash 9.0.16)
Firefox 1.5.0.6 for Windows (with Flash 9.0.16)
Firefox 1.5.0.6 for Linux (with Flash 7.0.63)

The two vulnerabilities reported are as follows:

XML.addRequestHeader() Vulnerability

The addRequestHeader() method insufficiently secures itself, providing a way around a security restriction that does not permit developers to use addRequestHeader() to set headers such as Host, Referer or Content-Length. As a result, it is possible to inject arbitrary headers with HTTP requests. The Rapid7 security paper points out that this vulnerability is similar to other, previously-reported vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash 7 and 8.

XML.contentType Vulnerability

The XML.contentType attribute contains the same vulnerability found in the addRequestHeader() and it can be exploited in the same way because Adobe Flash does not check the validity of the attribute’s value before building the HTTP request.

According to Rapid7, Adobe was notified of the vulnerabilities but has not yet released a fix or upgrade to Adobe Flash Player. To protect from the risk of attack, Rapid7 offers four solutions in the interim:

Upgrade to the beta version (Flash Player 9.0.18d60 for Windows), which is fixed;
Only allow trusted Web sites to use Flash;
Use alternative Flash Plugins (GplFlash, Gnash); or
Uninstall Adobe Flash Player.

According to Adobe, there are 700 million Adobe Flash users worldwide (source: labs.adobe.com).

To protect its customers, Rapid7 has added data on these two vulnerabilities to security checks performed by Nexpose, its enterprise network vulnerability management solution.

About Rapid7 Nexpose

The award-winning Rapid7 Nexpose Unified Vulnerability Management (UVM) is an all-in-one security solution that scans networks, Web applications, databases, to locate threats, assess their risk to the environment, devise a remediation plan and implement the ticketing process. Nexpose incorporates an expert system to build a knowledge base of facts on the environment it explores and model potential targeted attacks to expose all existing threats. Nexpose provides robust reporting capabilities that ensure compliance with governmental regulations, corporate security configuration policies, and the PCI Data Security Standard. Nexpose is available as a "plug and play" appliance, downloadable software, or an On-Demand hosted solution.

About Rapid7

Rapid7 is the leading provider of security risk intelligence solutions. Rapid7's integrated vulnerability management and penetration testing products, Nexpose and Metasploit, empower organizations to obtain accurate, actionable and contextual intelligence into their threat and risk posture. Rapid7's solutions are being used by more than 1,700 enterprises and government agencies in more than 65 countries worldwide, while the Company's free products are downloaded more than one million times per year and enhanced further by over 125,000 security community users and contributors. Rapid7 has been recognized as one of the fastest growing security companies by Inc. Magazine and as a "Top Place to Work" by the Boston Globe. The Company is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Technology Crossover Ventures. For more information about Rapid7, please visit http://www.rapid7.com.