The story of Adobe Reader symbols
Summary: Project Zero researcher Mateusz Jurczyk analyzed Adobe Reader executables and libraries across versions dating back to 1997 and found that Unix builds of acroread, AGM, CoolType, BIB, JP2K and rt3d shipped with embedded debug symbols at various points, with the last public CoolType symbols from 2005 and others as recent as 2013. He used the macOS AdobeJP2K symbols to manually rename functions in JP2KLib.dll and produce readable stack traces for heap corruption bugs such as issue #1892, noting that Adobe never shipped Windows .pdb files.
What you should know: Symbols embedded in two-decade-old Unix builds still map onto the current Windows binaries, so a crash that reads as JP2KLib!JP2KCopyRect+0x17ce9 can be traced to a named function - meaning the debugging context a vendor withholds on one platform may already be public on another.
Read the original at Google Project Zero ↗
- Topics
- Vulnerabilities & Patching
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