Abdul Qabiz's Blog - India

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August 27, 2007

Adobe Flash Player's Security-Sandbox is very restrictive

Adobe Flash Player Security-Sandbox is very good and we have not heard any major security vulnerabilities so far. However, I think, it can be made more intelligent, I have some use-cases where I can't do anything.

XMLSocket API is cool, since it's inception, developers could create cool applications (multi-player games, chat-apps, presence-apps etc). XMLSocket servers (unity, swocket etc) is needed to comply with a specification in order to work with Flash Player (as a client). Since developers are using/creating custom-servers, they could control various things on server-side, f.ex: configuring right security-permissions, serving right policy-file (crossdomain.xml) etc.

With Binary Socket API, in Adobe Flash runtimes, things have changed a lot. Applications (for Adobe Flash runtimes) can now connect to servers using standard protocols (POP3, SMTP, Databases, HTTP etc). Totally cool feature which allows creation of kick-ass applications (Yahoo! Web Messenger, mySql driver etc). But Adobe Flash Player's security-sandbox is limiting Binary Socket's capabilities.

I have been working on a library (as3httpclient) to do more things (http-status-messages, http-authentication over GET request, support for more http-methods etc) which are not supported by URLLoader API. This library (as3httpclient) doesn't work in deployed web-application because Adobe Flash Player's Security-Sandbox restricts it to.

I have following questions/concerns:-

• When URLLoader (or other such native APIs) can connect on any port, why can't custom APIs (as3httpclient and others) connect?
• Why can't Flash Player be little more intelligent to check, if connection is made to a HTTP server? Rules could be:- If connection is requested to same domain and destination-port is assigned to HTTP server, let communication happen. If destination server:port is in different domain, check for valid crossdomain.xml and allow the connection?
• Why doesn't Flash Player consider to-ports attributes, if policy-file is served over HTTP?

With standards, we expect flexibility. We can't expect a HTTP server to push policy-file to Flash clients? That's not standard.

Technorati tags: adobe, flash player 9, security sandbox, binary socket, as3httpclient

Posted by Abdul Qabiz at August 27, 2007 04:52 PM

Comments

Posted by: maliboo at August 27, 2007 07:32 PM

Posted by: Abdul Qabiz at August 27, 2007 07:59 PM

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