Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2012-88

Miscellaneous memory safety hazards (rv:16.0.1)

Announced
October 11, 2012
Reporter
Mozilla Developers
Impact
Critical
Products
Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird
Fixed in
  • Firefox 16.0.1
  • SeaMonkey 2.13.1
  • Thunderbird 16.0.1

Description

Mozilla developers identified and fixed two top crashing bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. These bugs 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.

The first of these bugs, a FreeType issue, is a mobile only issue which happens on custom kernels like Cyanogenmod, not on standard Android installations. The second bug is a websockets crash affecting Firefox 16 but not Firefox ESR.

References