Firefox to have Flash Player in a sandbox

Adobe is offering a public beta version of Flash Player for Firefox with a protected mode.

This is good news for Firefox users. Recently, the German administration recommended the use of sandbox protection for web browsers – something that Firefox didn’t have, although this will soon change with the release of a Flash Player plugin.

Adobe has announced the release of a beta version of Flash Player aimed at Firefox so that plug-ins can be placed in a confined environment. Adobe talks of a protected mode similar to that used for Adobe Reader X.

This protected mode will be available from Firefox 4.0 and later versions under Windows Vista and Windows 7. The development of the plugin has been done with the assistance of Mozilla so that it is correctly integrated into the browser. The final version will be available later in the year.

According to Adobe, the sandboxing technology has proved its effectiveness by making the creation of exploitations a lot more difficult: "Since its launch in November 2010, we have never seen a single successful exploitation against Adobe Reader X. We hope to see similar results with Flash Player’s sandboxing for Firefox."

Don’t forget that Flash Player is one of the software components most often attacked due to its security vulnerabilities that are relatively simple to exploit when viewing a web site.