Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2012-85

Use-after-free, buffer overflow, and out of bounds read issues found using Address Sanitizer

Announced
October 9, 2012
Reporter
Abhishek Arya
Impact
Critical
Products
Firefox, Firefox ESR, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Thunderbird ESR
Fixed in
  • Firefox 16
  • Firefox ESR 10.0.8
  • SeaMonkey 2.13
  • Thunderbird 16
  • Thunderbird ESR 10.0.8

Description

Security researcher Abhishek Arya (Inferno) of the Google Chrome Security Team discovered a series of use-after-free, buffer overflow, and out of bounds read issues using the Address Sanitizer tool in shipped software. These issues are potentially exploitable, allowing for remote code execution. We would also like to thank Abhishek for reporting two additional use-after-free flaws introduced during Firefox 16 development and fixed before general release.

In general these flaws cannot be exploited through email in the Thunderbird and SeaMonkey products because scripting is disabled, but are potentially a risk in browser or browser-like contexts in those products.

References