Adobe prepares critical out-of-cycle patch

An Adobe flaw disclosed at Black Hat is getting an emergency patch next week

Adobe is to release an out-of-cycle patch next week to fix a critical flaw in its Acrobat and Reader platforms.

The company said in a security advisory that the attack vector is a flaw in TrueType that allows the running of malicious code embedded in a PDF document.

The problem was discovered by Charlie Miller, principal analyst at Independent Security Evaluators, and disclosed in a research document (PDF) at this year's Black Hat conference.

"The vulnerability is caused by an integer overflow error in CoolType.dll when parsing the 'maxCompositePoints' field value in the 'maxp' table of a TrueType font," said Secunia in a security advisory.

"This can be exploited to corrupt memory via a PDF file containing a specially crafted TrueType font. Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code."

The flaw affects Adobe Reader 9.3.3 for Windows, Macintosh and Unix, Acrobat 9.3.3 for Windows and Macintosh, and Reader 8.2.3 and Acrobat 8.2.3 for Windows and Macintosh.

Miller discovered the problem while testing a new security tool called BitBlaze. He did not publish exploit code, but gave enough details to allow exploit code to be designed.

"The updates will address critical security issues in the products, including CVE-2010-2862 which was discussed at the Black Hat USA 2010 security conference on July 28 2010," said Adobe's Product Security Incident Response team in a blog post.

The team also said that, as far as it is aware, no attacks have yet been found in the wild.