Google said on Wednesday that it has worked with Adobe to sandbox Flash Player in development builds of its Chrome browser application.
Google has been working with Adobe for nearly 8 months to ensure Flash Player takes advantage of the new sandboxing technology in Chrome. Google has previously sandboxed HTML rendering and JavaScript execution to provide its Chrome browser with extra security features. "This initial Flash Player sandbox is an important milestone in making Chrome even safer. In particular, users of Windows XP will see a major security benefit, as Chrome is currently the only browser on the XP platform that runs Flash Player in a sandbox," wrote Justin Schuh, software engineer at Google in a company blog posting.
Chrome"s sandboxing technology protects sensitive resources and information from being accessed by malicious code in the browser. The sandboxing technique is a first protection against malware, viruses and adware for users. Flash Player uses a specially modified version of Chrome"s sandbox technology. Google says the technology is included on the Windows XP, Vista and 7 versions of Chrome. "We’re working to improve protection against additional attack vectors, and will be using this initial effort to provide fully sandboxed implementations of the Flash Player on all platforms."
Users can get the latest version of Chrome by installing the dev channel builds of Chrome over at Google"s Chromium site. Google says those wishing to disable the sandbox can do so by adding "-disable-flash-sandbox" to the executable in the command line .