Flash Update May Break Certain Applications

Thursday, June 12 2008 - ,

At Brainshark we make heavy use of flash in our player and in our application in general. As we progress forward with new features and capabilities that usage will most likely continue to grow. While perusing my RSS feeds this morning I saw this link about Facebook application developers possibly facing broken applications do to a flash security update.

The official Adobe notice is here.

Recently Windows Vista was hacked via a Flash vulnerability  lending credence to the fact that Adobe needs to push these types of security updates out even if it means breaking existing code.

The big changes to watch out for:

  • You use sockets or XMLSockets, regardless of the domain to which you are connecting
  • You use addRequestHeader or URLRequest.requestHeaders in any network API call when sending or loading data cross-domain
  • You provide access to content on remote domains as a web service provider
  • You have SWFs that are exported for Flash Player 7 (SWF7) or earlier that communicate with the hosting HTML by any means
  • You use "BLOCKED SCRIPT" through network APIs to communicate outside a SWF

Check out the official Adobe documents here, which includes remediation steps.