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There's a difference between theoretical and practical security, though. On Windows everyone targets Adobe's products, because everyone uses them, thus they pre
by FreakLegion 14y ago
There's a difference between theoretical and practical security, though. On Windows everyone targets Adobe's products, because everyone uses them, thus they present the biggest attack surface. So while e.g. Acrobat may be more secure in theory, in practice it's the least secure of all.
If OS X ships with a built-in PDF viewer then it probably presents the bigger attack surface, thus could be less secure than Adobe's products in that case. But as an individual (non-enterprise) user, statistically you'd still be better off with some niche third-party offering.
- saurik 14y agoMost of the "niche" renderers use the same codebase (or at best only rely on large common libraries like FreeType); the JailbreakMe 2/3 exploits, for example, were able to affect almost all of them (its payload simply assumed it was trapped in MobileSafari and wanted root on an iPhone, but on systems without codesign I believe it could have affected just about everyone fairly generally). The thing that Adobe has going for it is that when there is a bug, they tend to fix it, they fix it correctly (JailbreakMe 3 shouldn't have been possible), and the fix is pushed quickly to users via automatic update prompts.