Adobe Reader X: Seeking Safety in the Sandbox
Adobe has at long last released Reader X, a fortified version of its PDF Reader software that is built to withstand attacks from the sort of zero-day security vulnerabilities that repeatedly have threatened its user base over the past several years. The new Reader X version makes good on a promise Adobe announced in July of this year, when it said it would soon release a new kind of Reader designed to run the application in protected or “sandboxed” mode on Windows. Sandboxing is an established security mechanism that runs the targeted application in a confined environment that blocks specific actions by that app, such as installing or deleting files, or modifying system information. Adobe said that in developing the sandbox technology, it relied on experts from Microsoft and Google (the latter already has incorporated sandboxing into its Chrome Web browser).
