Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2013-05

Use-after-free when displaying table with many columns and column groups

Announced
January 8, 2013
Reporter
Atte Kettunen
Impact
Critical
Products
Firefox, Firefox ESR, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Thunderbird ESR
Fixed in
  • Firefox 18
  • Firefox ESR 10.0.12
  • Firefox ESR 17.0.2
  • SeaMonkey 2.15
  • Thunderbird 17.0.2
  • Thunderbird ESR 10.0.12
  • Thunderbird ESR 17.0.2

Description

Using the Address Sanitizer tool, security researcher Atte Kettunen from OUSPG discovered that the combination of large numbers of columns and column groups in a table could cause the array containing the columns during rendering to overwrite itself. This can lead to a user-after-free causing a potentially exploitable crash.

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