Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2013-75
Local Java applets may read contents of local file system
- Announced
- August 6, 2013
- Reporter
- Georgi Guninski, John Schoenick
- Impact
- High
- Products
- Firefox, Firefox ESR, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Thunderbird ESR
- Fixed in
-
- Firefox 23
- Firefox ESR 17.0.8
- SeaMonkey 2.20
- Thunderbird 17.0.8
- Thunderbird ESR 17.0.8
Description
Security researcher Georgi Guninski reported an issue with
Java applets where in some circumstances the applet could access files on the
local system when loaded using the a file:/// URI and violate file
origin policy due to interaction with the codebase parameter. This
affects applets running on the local file system. Mozilla developer John
Schoenick later discovered that fixes for this issue were inadequate
and allowed the invocation of Java applets to bypass security checks in
additional circumstances. This could lead to untrusted Java applets having
read-only access on the local files system if used in conjunction with a method
to download a file to a known or guessable path.
In general these flaws cannot be exploited through email in the Thunderbird product because scripting is disabled, but are potentially a risk in browser or browser-like contexts.