Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-46
Memory corruption with simultaneous events
- Announced
- July 25, 2006
- Reporter
- Secunia Research
- Impact
- Critical
- Products
- Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird
- Fixed in
-
- Firefox 1.5.0.5
- SeaMonkey 1.0.3
- Thunderbird 1.5.0.5
Description
Secunia Research has discovered a vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox 1.5 branch, which can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.
The vulnerability is caused due to an memory corruption error within the handling of simultaneously happening XPCOM events, which leads to use of a deleted timer object. This generally results in a crash but potentially could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on a user's system when a malicious website is visited.
This vulnerability was introduced during Firefox 1.5 development, it does not affect Firefox 1.0 or Mozilla Suite 1.7
Thunderbird shares the browser engine with Firefox and would be vulnerable if JavaScript were to be enabled in mail. This is not the default setting and we strongly discourage users from enabling JavaScript in mail.
Workaround
Disable JavaScript until you can upgrade to a fixed version. Do not enable JavaScript in mail clients such as Thunderbird.