Gandalf_The_Grey
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- Apr 24, 2016
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It’s unclear whether all the countless people who have the Adobe Acrobat browser extension installed actually use it. The extension being installed automatically along with the Adobe Acrobat application, chances are that they don’t even know about it. But security-wise it doesn’t matter, an extension that’s installed and unused could still be exploited by malicious actors. So a few months ago I decided to take a look.
To my surprise, the extension itself did almost nothing despite having a quite considerable code size. It’s in fact little more than a way to present Adobe Document Cloud via an extension, all of the user interface being hosted on Adobe’s servers. To make this work smoother, Adobe Acrobat extension grants documentcloud.adobe.com website access to some of its functionality, in particular a way to circumvent the browser’s same-origin policy (SOP). And that’s where trouble starts, it’s hard to keep these privileges restricted to Adobe properties.
Companies don’t usually like security reports pointing out that something bad could happen. So I went out on a quest to find a Cross-site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability allowing third-party websites to abuse the privileges granted to documentcloud.adobe.com. While I eventually succeeded, this investigation yielded a bunch of dead ends that are interesting on their own. These have been reported to Adobe, and I’ll outline them in this article as well.
TL;DR: Out of six issues reported, only one is resolved. The main issue received a partial fix, two more got fixes that didn’t quite address the issue. Two (admittedly minor) issues haven’t been addressed at all within 90 days from what I can tell.