Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2009-51
Chrome privilege escalation with FeedWriter
- Announced
- September 9, 2009
- Reporter
- moz_bug_r_a4
- Impact
- Critical
- Products
- Firefox
- Fixed in
-
- Firefox 3.0.14
- Firefox 3.5.3
Description
Mozilla security researcher moz_bug_r_a4 reported
that the BrowserFeedWriter could be leveraged to run
JavaScript code from web content with elevated privileges. Using this
vulnerability, an attacker could construct an object containing
malicious JavaScript and cause the FeedWriter to process the object,
running the malicious code with chrome privileges.
Thunderbird does not support
the BrowserFeedWriter object and is not vulnerable in its
default configuration. Thunderbird might be vulnerable if the user has
installed any add-on which adds a similarly implemented feature and
then enables JavaScript in mail messages. This is not the default
setting and we strongly discourage users from running JavaScript in
mail.
Workaround
Disable JavaScript until a version containing this fix can be installed.