Firefox 3.5.4 fixes critical security issues
Mozilla released Firefox 3.5.4 that fixes several security issues.
Crashes with evidence of memory corruption
Mozilla developers and community members identified and fixed several stability bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code.
Upgrade media libraries to fix memory safety bugs
Mozilla upgraded several third party libraries used in media rendering to address multiple memory safety and stability bugs identified by members of the Mozilla community. Some of the bugs discovered could potentially be used by an attacker to crash a victim’s browser and execute arbitrary code on their computer. liboggz, libvorbis, and liboggplay were all upgraded to address these issues.
Download filename spoofing with RTL override
When downloading a file containing a right-to-left override character (RTL) in the filename, the name displayed in the dialog title bar conflicts with the name of the file shown in the dialog body. An attacker could use this vulnerability to obfuscate the name and file extension of a file to be downloaded and opened, potentially causing a user to run an executable file when they expected to open a non-executable file.
Cross-origin data theft through document.getSelection()
text within a selection on a web page can be read by JavaScript in a different domain using the document.getSelection function, violating the same-origin policy. Since this vulnerability requires user interaction to exploit, its severity was determined to be moderate.
Heap buffer overflow in string to number conversion
There’s a heap-based buffer overflow in Mozilla’s string to floating point number conversion routines. Using this vulnerability an attacker could craft some malicious JavaScript code containing a very long string to be converted to a floating point number which would result in improper memory allocation and the execution of an arbitrary memory location. This vulnerability could thus be leveraged by the attacker to run arbitrary code on a victim’s computer.
Chrome privilege escalation in XPCVariant::VariantDataToJS()
The XPCOM utility XPCVariant::VariantDataToJS unwrapped doubly-wrapped objects before returning them to chrome callers. This could result in chrome privileged code calling methods on an object which had previously been created or modified by web content, potentially executing malicious JavaScript code with chrome privileges.
Heap buffer overflow in GIF color map parser
There’s a heap-based buffer overflow in Mozilla’s GIF image parser. This vulnerability could potentially be used by an attacker to crash a victim’s browser and run arbitrary code on their computer.
Crash in proxy auto-configuration regexp parsing
A flaw exists in the parsing of regular expressions used in Proxy Auto-configuration (PAC) files. In certain cases this flaw could be used by an attacker to crash a victim’s browser and run arbitrary code on their computer. Since this vulnerability requires the victim to have PAC configured in their environment with specific regular expresssions which can trigger the crash, the severity of the issue was determined to be moderate.
Crash with recursive web-worker calls
Recursive creation of JavaScript web-workers can be used to create a set of objects whose memory could be freed prior to their use. These conditions often result in a crash which could potentially be used by an attacker to run arbitrary code on a victim’s computer.
Local downloaded file tampering
The file naming scheme used for downloading a file which already exists in the downloads folder is predictable. If an attacker had local access to a victim’s computer and knew the name of a file the victim intended to open through the Download Manager, he could use this vulnerability to place a malicious file in the world-writable directory used to save temporary downloaded files and cause the browser to choose the incorrect file when opening it. Since this attack requires local access to the victim’s machine, the severity of this vulnerability was determined to be low.
Form history vulnerable to stealing
A user’s form history, both from web content as well as the smart location bar, was vulnerable to theft. A malicious web page could synthesize events such as mouse focus and key presses on behalf of the victim and trick the browser into auto-filling the form fields with history entries and then reading the entries.