Adobe Shockwave is a multimedia platform used to add animation and interactivity to web pages. Shockwave movies are authored in the Adobe Director environment. Any computer which has Shockwave plug-in installed can view Shockwave movies. Adobe Director files have the extension .dir which can be published into the Shockwave file format with extension .dcr.

A memory corruption vulnerability exists in Adobe Shockwave player. Specifically, the vulnerability occurs while processing specially crafted tSAC chunks in Director files. An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by enticing a user to open a crafted Director (.dir or .dcr) file. Successful exploitation would allow for arbitrary code injection and execution with the privileges of the currently logged in user. Code injection that does not result in execution would terminate the application due to memory corruption.

The vulnerability has been assigned as CVE-2011-2118.

SonicWALL has released an IPS signature to detect and block known exploits targeting this vulnerability. The following signature was released to address this issue:

• 6756 – Adobe Shockwave Director tSAC Chunk Memory Corruption PoC