Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2013-88
Compartment mismatch re-attaching XBL-backed nodes
- Announced
- September 17, 2013
- Reporter
- Sachin Shinde
- Impact
- High
- Products
- Firefox, Firefox ESR, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Thunderbird ESR
- Fixed in
-
- Firefox 24
- Firefox ESR 17.0.9
- SeaMonkey 2.21
- Thunderbird 24
- Thunderbird ESR 17.0.9
Description
Security researcher Sachin Shinde reported that moving
certain XBL-backed nodes from a document into the replacement document
created by document.open() can cause a JavaScript
compartment mismatch which can often lead to exploitable conditions.
Starting with Firefox 20 this condition was turned into a run-time assertion that would crash the browser in an unexploitable way, and in Firefox 24 the underlying cause was fixed.
In general this flaw cannot be exploited through email in the Thunderbird product because scripting is disabled, but is potentially a risk in browser or browser-like contexts.