Flash plugin up to date but Firefox keeps telling me that I have the old version

Question

According to my browser (Firefox 34.0) the installed version of the Shockwave Flash plugin appears to be 11.2.202.424. This version is considered to be insecure:

• https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/flash-player/apsb14-27.html

The plugin is therefore blocked:

• https://blocklist.addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/blocked/p796

In the attempt to update the plugin to the version currently considered safe (11.2.202.425), I found out that the recommended version apparantly is already installed:

$ yum info flash-plugin
Loaded plugins: langpacks, refresh-packagekit
Installed Packages
Name        : flash-plugin
Arch        : x86_64
Version     : 11.2.202.425
Release     : release
Size        : 19 M
Repo        : installed
From repo   : adobe-linux-x86_64
Summary     : Adobe Flash Player 11.2
URL         : http://www.adobe.com/downloads/
License     : Commercial
Description : Adobe Flash Plugin 11.2.202.425
            : Fully Supported: Mozilla SeaMonkey 1.0+, Firefox 1.5+, Mozilla
            : 1.7.13+

My operating system:

$ cat /etc/redhat-release 
Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug)

My questions:

• Do I have multiple versions of this plugin installed?
• How can I fix my installation?

Answer 1

I ran into this too, and found the answer in mozilla's bugzilla. In short, it happened because the plugin was updated while Firefox was running, and the pluginreg.dat got corrupted. So:

1. exit firefox
2. rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/pluginreg.dat
3. start firefox again

and you'll be all set. (The file will be regenerated.)

Of course, you'll need to make sure that the .425 version is installed via yum update or other method. Presumably, this problem has been happening harmlessly for many updates — this is just the first where we all noticed it because of the blacklisting.

Answer 2

I have tried rm ~/.mozilla/firefox/*/pluginreg.dat without any success, because in the addons page of firefox the flash plugin was still shown as vulerable with only the two options after it was newly generated: to deactivate or ask to activate.

I could solve the problem by editing the pluginsreg.dat which had the version number separated with comma instead of dots, even so i changed the description string:

Before:

[PLUGINS]
libflashplayer.so:$
/usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so:$
11,2,202,425:$
1416535783000:0:0:$
Shockwave Flash 11.2 r202:$
Shockwave Flash:$

After (working one):

[PLUGINS] 
libflashplayer.so:$
/usr/lib/flash-plugin/libflashplayer.so:$
11.2.202.425:$
1416535783000:0:0:$
Shockwave Flash 11.2.202.425:$
Shockwave Flash:$

After restarting firefox the flash plugin was set to always active in the addons page plugin config (all three options chooseable)

Answer 3

EDIT:

If you want modify all firefox profiles that are currently in use, you can use this simple script:

#!/bin/bash
for f in $(ps aux |grep "/usr/lib/firefox/firefox"| grep -v "grep" | head -1 |cut -d " " -f1); do 
        echo " * Found some firefox running .... updating pluginreg.dat"
        for d in $(find /home/${f}/.mozilla/ -name "pluginreg.dat"); do 
            echo " * Found ${d}"
            sed -i "s%11\.2\.202\.310%11\.2\.202\.425%g" ${d}
        done
done

In the sed sentence, you can modify the Version number of the FlashPlugin (11.2.202.310) to match your current version installed.