Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2008-52

Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2008-52

Title: Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.0.4/1.8.1.18)
Impact: Critical
Announced: November 12, 2008
Reporter: Mozilla developers and community
Products: Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey

Fixed in: Firefox 3.0.4
Firefox 2.0.0.18
Thunderbird 2.0.0.18
SeaMonkey 1.1.13
Description

Mozilla developers identified and fixed several stability bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code.

Thunderbird shares the browser engine with Firefox and could be vulnerable if JavaScript were to be enabled in mail. This is not the default setting and we strongly discourage users from running JavaScript in mail. Without further investigation we cannot rule out the possibility that for some of these an attacker might be able to prepare memory for exploitation through some means other than JavaScript such as large images.
Workaround

Disable JavaScript until a version containing these fixes can be installed.
References

Jesse Ruderman and Martijn Wargers reported crashes in the layout engine which affected Firefox 3 only. Daniel Veditz reported a crash in the browser engine which affected both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.

* Layout engine crashes - Firefox 3 only
* CVE-2008-5016
* Browser engine crash - Firefox 2 and 3
* CVE-2008-5017

Bob Clary reported a crash in the JavaScript engine which affected Firefox 2 only. Joachim Kuebart reported a crash in the JavaScript engine which affected both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.

* JavaScript engine crash - Firefox 2 only
* JavaScript engine crash - Firefox 2 and 3
* CVE-2008-5018