Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2009-43

Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2009-43

Title: Heap overflow in certificate regexp parsing
Impact: Critical
Announced: August 1, 2009
Reporter: Moxie Marlinspike
Products: Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, NSS

Fixed in: Firefox 3.5
NSS 3.12.3
Description

Moxie Marlinspike reported a heap overflow vulnerability in the code that handles regular expressions in certificate names. This vulnerability could be used to compromise the browser and run arbitrary code by presenting a specially crafted certificate to the client. This code provided compatibility with the non-standard regular expression syntax historically supported by Netscape clients and servers. With version 3.5 Firefox switched to the more limited industry-standard wildcard syntax instead and is not vulnerable to this flaw.
References

* https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=504456
* CVE-2009-2404