New to the AIR 1.5.2 release (and the corresponding Flash Player, 10.0.32) is the LocalConnection.isPerUser property. Note that you'll need to update your application's namespace to .../1.5.2 to access this property. Here's why you should do that.
LocalConnection provides local (i.e., on the same machine) communication between SWFs and AIR applications. It operates via a shared memory segment that's visible to all processes that use the mechanism.When LocalConnection was first implemented on Mac OS, it used a memory segment that is visible to all processes running on the machine. This was reasonable at the time, but problematic now that Mac OS is a multi-user operating system. The unfortunate result is that LocalConnection can be used to communicate across user accounts on Mac OS.
To address this a new, per-user implementation has been implemented on Mac OS. You should always use this mode; it's safer. To do that, set LocalConnection.isPerUser = true on every LocalConnection object you create.
Unfortunately, AIR can't do this for you transparently. The problem is that, if it did, you could get into a situation where version skew breaks use of LocalConnection. For example, this can occur if an application is running on AIR 1.5.2 and attempts to communicate with a SWF in the browser running on Flash Player 9. Until both sides are updated, there's no way to use the isPerUser = true option. By adding an API and making this an option, we've given you a chance to migrate to this option without breaking anything along the way.
This issue is specific to Mac OS. Windows and Linux use a user-scoped LocalConnection in all cases, regardless of the isPerUser setting. You can safely set LocalConnection.isPerUser = true everywhere and be confident that the Windows and Linux behavior won't change.
Final note: The default setting of this property is likely to change to true in a future release, in order to be consistent with our general philosophy of defaulting to safe behavior.
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