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A comment on Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root on macOS Silently. Parent comment

Re:Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root... by riffic on Thursday May 14, 2020 @02:03PM (#23183080)
as far as I know the macOS display subsystem was built around the PDF specification. You'd think the OS can handle viewing documents without much additional third-party overhead:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_2D

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)#Use_of...

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Re:Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root... by Someone on Thursday May 14, 2020 @02:19PM (#23183281)
It uses the same drawing primitives as PDF, but it certainly isn’t built around the PDF specification, which is enormous.

To give a few examples, there is no JavaScript interpreter in Quartz (https://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.html), nor does it have 3D graphics rendering built in (https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/displaying-3d-models-p...), or a Flash engine (https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/flash-player-needed-ac... this has bee removed from the Acrobat install, but used to ship with it)

To support PDFs fully, all of that would have to be implemented on top of Quartz.

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