Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2019-03

Security vulnerabilities fixed in Thunderbird 60.5

Announced
January 29, 2019
Impact
critical
Products
Thunderbird
Fixed in
  • Thunderbird 60.5

In general, these flaws cannot be exploited through email in the Thunderbird product because scripting is disabled when reading mail, but are potentially risks in browser or browser-like contexts.

#CVE-2018-18500: Use-after-free parsing HTML5 stream

Reporter
Yaniv Frank with SophosLabs
Impact
critical
Description

A use-after-free vulnerability can occur while parsing an HTML5 stream in concert with custom HTML elements. This results in the stream parser object being freed while still in use, leading to a potentially exploitable crash.

References

#CVE-2018-18505: Privilege escalation through IPC channel messages

Reporter
Jed Davis
Impact
high
Description

An earlier fix for an Inter-process Communication (IPC) vulnerability, CVE-2011-3079, added authentication to communication between IPC endpoints and server parents during IPC process creation. This authentication is insufficient for channels created after the IPC process is started, leading to the authentication not being correctly applied to later channels. This could allow for a sandbox escape through IPC channels due to lack of message validation in the listener process.

References

#CVE-2018-18512: Use-after-free during sound notifications

Reporter
Wayne Mery
Impact
high
Description

A use-after-free vulnerability can occur while playing a sound notification in Thunderbird. The memory storing the sound data is immediately freed, although the sound is still being played asynchronously, leading to a potentially exploitable crash.

References

#CVE-2016-5824: DoS (use-after-free) via a crafted ics file

Reporter
Brandon Perry
Impact
low
Description

A vulnerability in the Libical libary used by Thunderbird can allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (use-after-free) via a crafted ICS calendar file.

References

#CVE-2018-18513: DOS and crash with crafted S/MIME message or XPI package

Reporter
Hanno Böck, Damian Poddebniak
Impact
moderate
Description

A crash can occur when processing a crafted S/MIME message or an XPI package containing a crafted signature. This can be used as a denial-of-service (DOS) attack because Thunderbird reopens the last seen message on restart, triggering the crash again.

References

#CVE-2018-18501: Memory safety bugs fixed in Firefox 65, Firefox ESR 60.5, and Thunderbird 60.5

Reporter
Mozilla developers and community
Impact
critical
Description

Mozilla developers and community members Alex Gaynor, Christoph Diehl, Steven Crane, Jason Kratzer, Gary Kwong, and Christian Holler reported memory safety bugs present in Firefox 64, Firefox ESR 60.4, and Thunderbird 60.4. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that with enough effort that some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code.

References