Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2013-07

Crash due to handling of SSL on threads

Announced
January 8, 2013
Reporter
Jerry Baker
Impact
High
Products
Firefox, Firefox ESR, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Thunderbird ESR
Fixed in
  • Firefox 18
  • Firefox ESR 17.0.2
  • SeaMonkey 2.15
  • Thunderbird 17.0.2
  • Thunderbird ESR 17.0.2

Description

Mozilla community member Jerry Baker reported a crashing issue found through Thunderbird when downloading messages over a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection. This was caused by a bug in the networking code assuming that secure connections were entirely handled on the socket transport thread when they can occur on a variety of threads. The resulting crash was potentially exploitable.

While the initial issue was found through Thunderbird, the affected networking library is common to Mozilla code.

References