Adobe (Finally) Getting Security Religion

In the past number of years Adobe Systems hasn't seemed to have its act together when it comes to mitigating security risks in its PDF. Hopefully, that's about to change.When it comes to security, this has been a tough year for Adobe. It's near ubiquitous document format, PDF, has been the target of a number of attacks and highly publicized zero-days.

In March, I dinged Adobe for its handling of a zero-day. It seems its customers must have been putting on the pressure, as well, according to this Adobe blog post the company is going to be focusing on hardening its legacy code, improve its response time to zero-day and vulnerability discoveries, and provide a more consistent patch publishing schedule:

Since February, Adobe Reader and Acrobat engineers have been executing a major project focused on software security. Everything from our security team's communications during an incident to our security update process to the code itself has been carefully reviewed. Security is an ongoing process, so while we believe our plan will eliminate or mitigate many potential security risks, we are also working to enhance our ability to respond to externally found vulnerabilities in Adobe Reader and Acrobat in the future.

In particular, we have focused this security effort in three major areas: