Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2015-111
Errors in the handling of CORS preflight request headers
- Announced
- September 22, 2015
- Reporter
- Ehsan Akhgari
- Impact
- High
- Products
- Firefox, Firefox ESR, Firefox OS, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird
- Fixed in
-
- Firefox 41
- Firefox ESR 38.3
- Firefox OS 2.5
- SeaMonkey 2.38
- Thunderbird 38.3
Description
Mozilla developer Ehsan Akhgari reported two issues with Cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) "preflight" requests.
The first issue is that in some circumstances the same cache key can be generated for two preflight requests on a site. As a result, if a second request is made that will match the cached key generated by an earlier request, CORS checks will be bypassed because the system will see the previously cached request as applicable.
In the second issue, when some Access-Control- headers are missing from
CORS responses, the values from different Access-Control- headers can be used
that present in the same response.
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.