Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2008-60

Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2008-60

Title: Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.0.5/1.8.1.19)
Impact: Critical
Announced: December 16, 2008
Reporter: Mozilla developers
Products: Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey

Fixed in: Firefox 3.0.5
Firefox 2.0.0.19
Thunderbird 2.0.0.19
SeaMonkey 1.1.14
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

Daniel Veditz, and Jesse Ruderman reported crashes in the layout engine which affected both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3. David Baron reported a crash in the layout engine which only affected Firefox 2 as well as a crash in the layout engine which only affected Firefox 3.

* Layout engine crashes - Firefox 2 and 3
* CVE-2008-5500
* Layout engine crash - Firefox 3 only
* CVE-2008-5501

Gary Kwong reported a crash in the JavaScript engine which affected Firefox 3 only.

* JavaScript engine crash - Firefox 3 only
* CVE-2008-5502