Google Builds Stronger Flash Sandbox in Chrome

Google yesterday announced it had wrapped up work on a stronger Flash sandbox in the Windows version of Chrome, and would soon ship the same for its OS X browser. Chrome 21, which launched July 31, completed efforts to ditch the aged NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) Flash plug-in for one built to Google's own PPAPI (Pepper Plugin Application Programming Interface) standard.

By porting Flash Player to PPAPI, Google's engineers were able to stuff the Adobe plug-in into a "sandbox" as robust as the one that protects Chrome itself. "Windows Flash is now inside a sandbox that's as strong as Chrome's native sandbox, and dramatically more robust than anything else available," Justin Schuh, a Chrome engineer, in a post to the Chromium blog Wednesday. A sandbox is an anti-exploit technology that isolates processes on the computer, preventing or at least hindering malware from letting hackers exploit an unpatched vulnerability, escalate privileges and push their attack code onto the machine.