CVE-2014-0502 — Adobe Air
HIGHCVE-2014-0502 is a high-severity (CVSS 8.8) CWE-415 vulnerability in adobe adobe air. It is in CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog (added 2024-09-17) — treat it as actively exploited and patch now. A fix is available — see the affected versions and patch details below.
Double free vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player before 11.7.700.269 and 11.8.x through 12.0.x before 12.0.0.70 on Windows and Mac OS X and before 11.2.202.341 on Linux, Adobe AIR before…
Exploitation Status
Actively exploited in the wild
- Confirmed by CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 2024-09-17. Federal agencies were required to remediate by 2024-10-08.
- CISA assesses this as automatable — exploitation doesn’t require manual, per-target effort, which raises the odds of mass scanning and opportunistic attacks.
- A successful exploit gives an attacker total control of the affected component, not partial access.
Exploitation and automatability from CISA (KEV catalog and SSVC triage) for CVE-2014-0502.
EPSS Exploitation Probability
Probability of exploitation in the next 30 days, from FIRST.org EPSS.
How urgent is this, really
CVE-2014-0502 by exploitation likelihood (EPSS) against impact (CVSS). Outside the shaded patch-first corner.
Where this sits among everything scored
Of 394,803 CVEs with a current EPSS score, this one falls in the 10–50% band (highlighted). Counts from FIRST.org, log-scaled.
Description
Double free vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player before 11.7.700.269 and 11.8.x through 12.0.x before 12.0.0.70 on Windows and Mac OS X and before 11.2.202.341 on Linux, Adobe AIR before 4.0.0.1628 on Android, Adobe AIR SDK before 4.0.0.1628, and Adobe AIR SDK & Compiler before 4.0.0.1628 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via unspecified vectors, as exploited in the wild in February 2014.
Affected Products
adobe airadobeadobe air sdkadobeflash playeradobeopensuseopensuseenterprise linux desktopredhatenterprise linux eusredhatResearch use only. For defensive security, authorized penetration testing, and academic research only. Never execute exploit code against systems without explicit written authorization.
Double free vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player before 11.7.700.269 and …
Double free vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player before 11.7.700.269 and …
Double free vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player before 11.7.700.269 and …
Double free vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player before 11.7.700.269 and …
Detection & mitigation playbook
Vendor / applianceDetect
Inventory every adobe adobe air deployment and check each version against the affected-products list above.
Fix
Apply the adobe adobe air security patch or hotfix for CVE-2014-0502 on the affected version, following the vendor advisory for your exact build.
Workarounds
Constrain what reaches the vulnerable code: limit the size and shape of untrusted input, isolate the affected component in a sandboxed or least-privileged process, and enable the platform's memory-safety mitigations (ASLR, stack protector, hardened allocator) so an out-of-bounds access is more likely to fail closed than to be exploitable. Alongside that, restrict the management interface to trusted networks and apply the vendor's recommended configuration mitigations.
Fixing This On Your OS
If you run this on a Linux distribution, patch through your package manager against the distro's own security advisory below — it tracks the exact backported fix for your release, which can ship on a different timeline (and sometimes a different severity) than the upstream project.
| Product | Fixed in | Advisory |
|---|---|---|
| Supplementary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 | flash-plugin-0:11.2.202.341-1.el5 | RHSA-2014:0196 |
Frequently Asked Questions
Is CVE-2014-0502 being exploited in your environment?
Detect and block the exploit chain at execution, on systems you cannot patch yet.