Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-64

Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.0.7)

Announced
September 14, 2006
Reporter
Mozilla Developers
Impact
Critical
Products
Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird
Fixed in
  • Firefox 1.5.0.7
  • SeaMonkey 1.0.5
  • Thunderbird 1.5.0.7

Description

As part of the Firefox 1.5.0.7 release we fixed several bugs to improve the stability of the product. Some of these were crashes that showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code with enough effort.

We thank Bernd Mielke, Georgi Guninski, Igor Bukanov, Jesse Ruderman, Martijn Wargers, Mats Palmgren, Olli Pettay, shutdown, and Weston Carloss for discovering and reporting these crashes.

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. Without further investigation we cannot rule out the possibility that for some of these an attacker might be able to prepare memory for exploitation through some means other than JavaScript, such as large images or plugin data.

Workaround

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

References

CVE-2006-4571

Bernd Mielke and Mats Palmgren reported crashes involving tables

Georgi Guninski discovered heap corruption using XSLTProcessor

Igor Bukanov reported potential memory corruption in the JavaScript engine

Jesse Ruderman, Martijn Wargers, Mats Palmgren, Olli Pettay, and Weston Carloss reported crashes involving DHTML

shutdown reported it was still possible to corrupt memory via content-implemented tree views despite the fix for bug 326501