May 13, 2011 11:25 GMT  ·  By

Adobe has released the first stable versions of Flash Player 10.3, which addresses many critical vulnerabilities and integrates with browser privacy controls.

A number of eleven security flaws were patched, ten of which can lead to arbitrary code execution. The other one was a design flaw that could have resulted in information disclosure.

Of the remote code execution vulnerabilities, five are described as memory corruption flaws, four as bounds checking bugs and one as an integer overflow error.

One of the patched vulnerabilities, CVE-2011-0627, is reportedly being exploited in the wild via malicious swf content embedded in Word and Excel documents.

"However, to date, Adobe has not obtained a sample that successfully completes an attack," the company writes in its advisory.

Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Solaris users are advised to upgrade to version 10.3.181.14, while Android handset owners can download version 10.3.185.21 from the Android Market.

In addition to this security content, the new Flash Player 10.3 also integrates with the privacy controls of Mozilla Firefox 4, Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 and higher, Google Chrome 11 and current Apple Safari dev builds.

This allows users to clear the Flash local storage (Local Shared Objects) directly from the browser interface when clearing other types of surfing data, like cache, cookies, history, etc.

This addresses concerns of clearing Flash cookies being a cumbersome and obscure process, which security researchers have expressed after certain websites began abusing the Flash storage in order to track users or re-spawn deleted cookies.

Flash Player 10.3 also integrates with the system control panels of Windows, Mac and Linux to allow users to modify Flash security, privacy and storage settings easier.

The release also introduces update notifications for Mac OS X users. Ever since Apple stopped delivering Flash Player updates through the Mac OS X Software Update feature last October, users had to download and install new versions manually.