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Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2012-16

Escalation of privilege with Javascript: URL as home page

Announced
March 13, 2012
Reporter
Mariusz Mlynski
Impact
Critical
Products
Firefox, Firefox ESR, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Thunderbird ESR
Fixed in
  • Firefox 11
  • Firefox 3.6.28
  • Firefox ESR 10.0.3
  • SeaMonkey 2.8
  • Thunderbird 11
  • Thunderbird 3.1.20
  • Thunderbird ESR 10.0.3

Description

Security researcher Mariusz Mlynski reported that an attacker able to convince a potential victim to set a new home page by dragging a link to the "home" button can set that user's home page to a javascript: URL. Once this is done the attacker's page can cause repeated crashes of the browser, eventually getting the script URL loaded in the privileged about:sessionrestore context.

References