Would Open Source Flash Player Be Safer?

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Flash’s Final Countdown Has Begun
by Tom Spring | August 16, 2017

 
Few times have there been technologies so reviled and celebrated at the same time as Adobe Flash. Since its introduction as Macromedia Flash Player in the mid-’90s, the technology has helped shape what the web has become today. At the same time, few internet technologies have united so many wanting to kick it to the curb.
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Replacing it will be open standards such as HTML5, WebGL and WebAssembly.
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Today, Adobe Flash security holes still dominate the threat landscape. So far this year there have been 60 unique CVEs associated with Flash, 53 rated high-severity allowing attackers to remotely execute code. Earlier this month Adobe patched a serious local sandbox escape bug in its Flash Player after researchers failed to fix the bug completely in a previous patch.

However, despite indicators pointing to a swift death and depreciation of Flash over the next three years, the transition could present challenges for companies. Experts say dependence on Adobe Flash will create legacy issues similar to those of Windows XP.
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Developer Juha Lindstedt reacted to Adobe’s end of life verdict for Flash and turned to GitHub to petition users there to save Adobe Flash. His goal is to convince Adobe to turnover its Flash code to the open-source community.

In his petition, Lindstedt calls Flash “an important piece of internet history and killing Flash means future generations can’t access the past. Games, experiments and websites would be forgotten.”

The petition has received mixed reviews within the software development and security communities. While some see Flash as bloated insecure code that needs to go away fast, others see handing it over to the open source community as a way to make it more secure and ensure that any legacy instances of Flash—after it sunsets—can be addressed with an emergency patch.

 
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Elly, MrBrian, AlexEiffel

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Interesting.

I would not want Flash to be saved, I want it removed from all the Web, but it is true that lots of old parts of the web won’t be accessible no more because it won’t have been converted to something else. I am thinking about small kids game portals that took years for the developers to build, for example.

One great thing about the web is you could be sure if you did a web page in html that it would probably still works 20 years from when you coded it. Old computer, new computer, new devices like smartphone, it worked, even if not always in the most usable way (smartphone). Interesting to compare that to doing an App on a platform that might require you to maybe update the code of the app every year so it continues to work.

The web should be a place where technologies are accessible for a long time while allowing for evolution. I think it has been a success on the browser side. Only third-party add-ons proved less sustainable (Java, Flash…). Hopefully, html5 will cover all the gaps left and this early part of the web will be the only one lost.

One great thing about the web is its accessibility. It was and is still not hard for someone with an idea to share to build a simple web page and give it to the world. That is a wonderful thing. Non-techies can share all their non-techies great ideas as much as the techies.

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Elly

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? says:

anyone noticed that the settings in the flash control panel now revert to allow flash to store info on the hdd?

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? says:

If anyone is interested, please see:
“Local Settings Manager Won’t Retain Settings”

https://forums.adobe.com/thread/2385788

according to this discussing “Staff” indicates the problem will be addressed in the next release scheduled for tomorrow  Tuesday 10/10/2017.

I guess we will see

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Elly, MrBrian

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The idea of Flash being open is interesting, but it makes me wonder. Why is Flash so prone to security holes in the first place? And whatever the reason is, can it be fixed so it’s not so prone to holes?

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Elly

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