Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2007-18

Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.1.5)

Announced
July 17, 2007
Reporter
Mozilla developers and community
Impact
Critical
Products
Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird
Fixed in
  • Firefox 2.0.0.5
  • SeaMonkey 1.1.3
  • Thunderbird 1.5.0.13
  • Thunderbird 2.0.0.5

Description

As part of the Firefox 2.0.0.5 update releases Mozilla developers fixed many bugs to improve the stability of the product. Some of these crashes that 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.

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.

References

Bernd Mielke, Boris Zbarsky, David Baron, Daniel Veditz, Jesse Ruderman, Lukas Loehrer, Martijn Wargers, Mats Palmgren, Olli Pettay, Paul Nickerson and Vladimir Sukhoy reported crashes in the browser engine.

Asaf Romano, Jesse Ruderman, Igor Bukanov reported crashes in the JavaScript engine.