Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2008-01

Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.8.1.12)

Announced

February 7, 2008

Reporter

Mozilla developers and community

Impact

Critical

Products

Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird

Fixed in

• Firefox 2.0.0.12
• SeaMonkey 1.1.8
• Thunderbird 2.0.0.12

Description

Mozilla developers identified and fixed several stability bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox 2.0.0.12 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, Kai Engert, Martijn Wargers, Mats Palmgren, and Paul Nickerson reported crashes in the browser engine.

• CVE-2008-0412
• Browser crashes

Carsten Book, Wesley Garland, Igor Bukanov, moz_bug_r_a4, shutdown, Philip Taylor, and tgirmann reported crashes in the JavaScript engine.

• CVE-2008-0413
• JavaScript engine crashes