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Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2016-80

Same-origin policy violation using local HTML file and saved shortcut file

Announced
August 2, 2016
Reporter
Abdulrahman Alqabandi
Impact
Moderate
Products
Firefox, Firefox ESR
Fixed in
  • Firefox 48
  • Firefox ESR 45.3

Description

Security researcher Abdulrahman Alqabandi reported that when a local HTML file resides in the same directory as a malicious local shortcut file, the shortcut can be called by the local page to allow the page to read the contents of local files or directories or to load an arbitrary website in violation of same-origin policy, allowing for data theft. In order for this vulnerability to be triggered, both the malicious HTML file as well as the shortcut must be saved to the same local directory and then loaded from there by a user.

References