Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root on macOS Silently

Re:Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root... by dkdk8283 on Thursday May 14, 2020 @03:11PM (#23184003)

I searched for this but couldn’t find any technical articles giving details. Have any links or search bait to share?

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Re:Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root... by kitotik on Thursday May 14, 2020 @05:10PM (#23185499)

I’m not finding much searching around either. I probably have an old spinning rust drive somewhere with the files still on them. This was somewhere around the CS5 or CS6 days, pre-subscription model.

From memory, in addition to sticking some pseudo-randomly named files in /System/Library, /Library, and -/Library, it would place a file in the root directory of all hfs+ volumes with xattrs set to hide and write-protect the file. Installers would then look for these files to check licensing status.

At the time, this was a fairly common trick with pro/prosumer proprietary software.

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Re:Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root... by thejsa on Friday May 15, 2020 @04:13AM (#23190018)

I believe on Windows the FlexNet DRM they use(d?) would overwrite Sector 32 and/or sometimes other nearby ones [0], which broke a fair few people’s GRUB2 bootloader installs as well as TrueCrypt as Flexera apparently didn’t check to see if it was in use for something else first.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlexNet_Publisher#Issues_with_...

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