Peleus here. In December of 2010, I wrote a blog post describing the first steps towards sandboxing Flash Player within Google Chrome. In the blog, I stated that the Flash Player team would explore bringing sandboxing technology to other browsers. We then spent 2011 buried deep within Adobe laying the groundwork for several new security innovations.

Today, Adobe has launched a public beta of our new Flash Player sandbox (aka “Protected Mode”) for the Firefox browser. The design of this sandbox is similar to what Adobe delivered with Adobe Reader X Protected Mode and follows the same Practical Windows Sandboxing approach. Like the Adobe Reader X sandbox, Flash Player will establish a low integrity, highly restricted process that must communicate through a broker to limit its privileged activities. The sandboxed process is restricted with the same job limits and privilege restrictions as the Adobe Reader Protected Mode implementation. Adobe Flash Player Protected Mode for Firefox 4.0 or later will be supported on both Windows Vista and Windows 7. We would like to thank the Mozilla team for assisting us with some of the more challenging browser integration bugs. For Flash Player, this is the next evolutionary step in protecting our customers.

Sandboxing technology has proven very effective in protecting users by increasing the cost and complexity of authoring effective exploits. For example, since its launch in November 2010, we have not seen a single successful exploit in the wild against Adobe Reader X. We hope to see similar results with the Flash Player sandbox for Firefox once the final version is released later this year. In the meantime, please help us get these protections out to end-users as fast as possible by volunteering to download our beta and help test. Information on known bugs, configuration options and other information can be found on Adobe Labs in the “Getting Started” section.

P.S.: I will be speaking at CanSecWest on this and other exciting topics. I hope to see everyone there!