Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2008-55

Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2008-55

Title: Crash and remote code execution in nsFrameManager
Impact: Critical
Announced: November 12, 2008
Reporter: ling and wushi of team509 (via TippingPoint)
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

ling and wushi of team509, via TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative program, reported a flaw in part of Mozilla's DOM constructing code. This vulnerability can be exploited by modifying certain properties of a file input element before it has finished initializing. When the blur method of the modified input element is called, uninitialized memory is accessed by the browser, resulting in a crash. This crash may be used by an attacker to run arbitrary code on a victim's computer.

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.
Workaround

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

* https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=456896
* CVE-2008-5021