Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-11

Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8)

Announced
April 13, 2006
Reporter
various
Impact
Critical
Products
Firefox, Mozilla Suite, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird
Fixed in
  • Firefox 1.0.8
  • Firefox 1.5
  • Mozilla Suite 1.7.13
  • SeaMonkey 1
  • Thunderbird 1.0.8
  • Thunderbird 1.5

Description

As part of the Firefox 1.5 release we fixed several crash bugs to improve the stability of the product. Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption that we presume could be exploited to run arbitrary code and have been applied to the Firefox 1.0.x and Mozilla Suite 1.7.x releases

While fixing an unexploitable recursion-induced crash Bernd Mielke discovered that the CSS border-rendering code could potentially write past the end of an array.

Alden D'Souza reported a crash when using an extremely large regular expression in JavaScript. This was tracked down to a 16-bit integer overflow that could potentially cause the browser to interpret attacker supplied data as JavaScript bytecode.

Martijn Wargers found two potentially exploitable crashes when programmatically changing the -moz-grid and -moz-grid-group display styles.

Bob Clary found a memory corruption crash using the InstallTrigger.install() method that was introduced in Firefox 1.0.7 by one of the regression fixes described in MFSA 2005-58.

Thunderbird shares the browser engine with Firefox and could be vulnerable if JavaScript were to be enabled in mail. This is not the default setting and we strongly discourage users from running JavaScript in mail.

Workaround

Upgrade to the fixed versions. Do not enable JavaScript in Thunderbird or the mail portions of SeaMonkey and the Mozilla Suite.

References