BlackBerry Fixes Vulnerabilities Related to Heartbleed, Flash

BlackBerry released two security advisories today, including one related to the OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability.

The first advisory addresses remote code execution vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player affecting BlackBerry Z10, BlackBerry Q10 and BlackBerry Q5 smartphones. The vulnerabilities are not known to be under attack.

“BlackBerry customer risk is limited by the BlackBerry 10 OS design, which restricts an application’s access to system resources and the private data of other applications,” according to an advisory. “Successful exploitation requires an attacker to craft malicious Adobe Flash content and requires that a user access the malicious content on a webpage or as a downloaded Adobe AIR application. If the requirements are met for exploitation, an attacker could potentially execute code with the rights of the application that opens the specially crafted malicious Flash content.”

In addition to an advisory about the Flash vulnerabilities, BlackBerry also issued a second advisory today related to Heartbleed dealing with a number of BlackBerry products, including BBM for Android and iPhone and Secure Work Space for iOS and Android, as well as BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 and BlackBerry Link.

“BlackBerry customer risk is limited in all cases by the requirement that an attacker first gain access to an affected product in order to then mount a successful attack,” the advisory notes. “Additionally, BBM for Android and iPhone, Secure Work Space, and Link, customer risk is also limited by the need for an attacker to successfully complete a man-in-the-middle attack that is capable of spoofing IP addresses. Successful exploitation requires an attacker to send a malformed request for a heartbeat reply to an SSL endpoint that is running a vulnerable version of OpenSSL. If the requirements are met for exploitation, an attacker could potentially gain access to limited but arbitrary data that is in memory. After installing the recommended software update, affected BlackBerry customers will be fully protected from this vulnerability.”

Scott Totzke, senior vice president for BlackBerry Security, said in a statement that the company’s investigation of the Heartbleed vulnerability determined that the majority of BlackBerry products were not affected. 

Separately, Microsoft and Adobe Systems also released security updates today to fix a number of critical vulnerabilities. The Microsoft updates address 13 vulnerabilities affecting Windows, Internet Explorer, SharePoint and other products, while Adobe released updates for Acrobat, Flash Player, Reader and Adobe Illustrator.