Adobe Reader
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_/05/2020.
Introduction
Adobe Reader is a software solution that was developed by Adobe Systems Inc. The product is mainly used in the opening, viewing, and reading pdf format files. The software solution is greatly popular as it is considered by most to be a game-changer compared to most viewers. This is mainly because Adobe displays all of its documents with the same design and layout as the original files, making pdf documents one of the most popular and widely used file formats on the internet. Adobe’s current headquarters is located in San Jose, California (Reader, 1987). The company was very instrumental in the creation and establishment of the desktop publishing industry through its development of the PostScript printer language.
The company was initially founded by two friends and computer scientists, namely, John Warnock and Charles Geschke. It is while under the employment of PARC, Palo Alto Research Center that the two developed the postscript programming language, which was originally designed to illustrate the precise size, shape, position of objects on a certain computer-generated page. In the beginning, Apple Computer bought an estimated 15 percent stock in Adobe, becoming the very first licensee of the postscript programming language. This collaboration played a huge part in the growth and development of both Adobe and postscript.
Unlike Adobe, other file types with the likes of google docs and Microsoft word, while viewing files, they often require to change its design and layout as a necessity to accommodate the actual size of the user’s screen. While this may prove to be very helpful when users are reading texts, it is not the case when they are dealing with other types of documents that contain both images and texts in the same file, such as E-books. Furthermore, documents that contain embedded pictures also have a habit of being very large in size. Hence, pdfs incorporate the use of compression technology. This significantly minimizes the size of the files, making them easier for users to download them.
Pdfs are often appealing to a vast majority of individuals who desire to create an unchangeable document mainly because pdfs are particularly difficult to modify, where changes would require special software’s to make it possible (Goldsmith, 2003). However, just like any other software solution regardless of all its practicalities and services it offers, Adobe also has a number of security vulnerabilities. Several vulnerabilities that have already been identified and patched had the potential of leading to user sensitive information being disclosed or the partial arbitrary code execution.
Most recently, Adobe issued an out of band security patch to help in mitigating the effects of two very critical vulnerabilities in the adobe reader. For both the macOS and Windows operating systems. The first vulnerability which was reported could easily lead to arbitrary code execution and was identified as CVE-2018-16011 while the second critical vulnerability is identified to be a security bypass flaw that could allow a malicious user to escalate their privileges. The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2018-19725.
References
Goldsmith, M., Greenberg, C., Robertson, A., & Hu-Chan, M. (2003). Global Leadership: The Next Generation, Adobe Reader. Ft Press.
Reader, A. (1987). Adobe Systems Incorporated.