Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2008-52
Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.0.4/1.8.1.18)
- Announced
- November 12, 2008
- Reporter
- Mozilla developers and community
- Impact
- Critical
- Products
- Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird
- Fixed in
-
- Firefox 2.0.0.18
- Firefox 3.0.4
- SeaMonkey 1.1.13
- Thunderbird 2.0.0.18
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, Martijn Wargers, and Gary Kwong 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.