As Flash was known for it having more holes than a Swiss cheese, how is Ruffle in terms of security?
this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2020
41 points (97.7% liked)
Open Source
30846 readers
297 users here now
All about open source! Feel free to ask questions, and share news, and interesting stuff!
Useful Links
- Open Source Initiative
- Free Software Foundation
- Electronic Frontier Foundation
- Software Freedom Conservancy
- It's FOSS
- Android FOSS Apps Megathread
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to the open source ideology
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon from opensource.org, but we are not affiliated with them.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
To be fair it's a flash drop in replacement. It isn't supposed to be secure by design, just like flash.
It is, the whole purpose of Ruffle is to play flash files, but without a security threat (which is the whole reason Flash doesn't exist anymore).
I expect it to fair much better than Flash. 808/1020 (79%) of the CVEs reported against flash were for memory errors (buffer overruns and things) that allowed remote code execution. So, assuming the Ruffle developers haven't been using "unsafe", just writing it in Rust immediately removes 80% of the security problems that were with Flash.
Also, many of the security problems with Flash were deliberate (by design). For example, Flash was designed to send your browser fingerprint to advertising sites. Ruffle obviously doesn't do that.
Thanks for your explanation!
It's running in a sandbox afaik, and the goal is to replace Flash but stay secure. Since it uses Web Assembly, you can't use Ruffle in any way to create any security threat, you couldn't create without using Ruffle. (Different to Flash, which created tons of new security threats, even leading to the plugin being disable).