Paranoid Android

Paranoid Android is now an open source project for those interested.

Update: A whitepaper and sample exploit are available

A vulnerability in Apple's Mac OS X results in a potential situation in which a malicious person could execute arbitrary commands on your machine, such as deleting your home directory, or doing other harmful actions. This vulnerability involves the use of URL "schemes". These are the part of a web address that specifies what program should be used to handle the address.

Paranoid Android can protect you from this potential vulnerability until Apple makes an official fix available. It does this by watching the URL schemes that are requested and delaying them until you've had a chance to say whether you'd like to proceed or not. If you know that the url that's being loaded is legit, go ahead, but if it looks suspicious, Paranoid Android gives you an opportunity to cancel it.

A further vulnerability in the way Mac OS X handles strong document bindings can lead to documents opening in a different application when opening a document causes an application to launch. This can lead to an arbitrary execution of code. Paranoid Android has been updated to address this new vulnerability.

Paranoid Android can protect you from this potential vulnerability until Apple makes an official fix available. It does this by watching which applications a document will open in and if it isn't the default application for that file type, it will delay them until you've had a chance to say whether you'd like to proceed or not. If the application that will be launched is not the one you expected to be launched, Paranoid Android gives you an opportunity to open the document in the default application for the file type.

Paranoid Android is completely free and open source - we do this for the benefit of Mac community. You can check out our other products too.

(Image used on Paranoid Android icon is courtesy of )

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