CVE-2010-3642

Vulnerability

CVE-2010-3642 is an unspecified memory corruption vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player. It affects versions before 9.0.289.0 and 10.x before 10.1.102.64 on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris, as well as version 10.1.95.1 on Android. The exact nature of the flaw is not disclosed, but it resides in the Flash Player runtime and can be triggered by unknown vectors [1].

Exploitation

An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by convincing a user to open a specially crafted Flash (SWF) file or visit a web page that loads malicious Flash content. No authentication or special network position is required beyond the ability to deliver the malicious content to the target. The exploitation vector is unspecified, but given the memory corruption nature, it likely involves parsing malformed data [1].

Impact

Successful exploitation allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the affected system, potentially gaining the same privileges as the user running Flash Player. Alternatively, the vulnerability can be used to cause a denial of service (DoS) through memory corruption, crashing the Flash Player process or the browser [1].

Mitigation

Adobe addressed this vulnerability in Flash Player 9.0.289.0 and 10.1.102.64 (and 10.1.95.1 for Android). Users should update to these or later versions. Red Hat also released updated packages via RHSA-2010-0834, RHSA-2010-0867, and RHSA-2010-0829 for affected Linux distributions [2][3][4]. No workaround is available; updating is the only mitigation.