Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2009-59
Heap buffer overflow in string to number conversion
- Announced
- October 27, 2009
- Reporter
- Alin Rad Pop
- Impact
- Critical
- Products
- Firefox
- Fixed in
-
- Firefox 3.0.15
- Firefox 3.5.4
Description
Security researcher Alin Rad Pop of Secunia Research reported a heap-based buffer overflow in Mozilla's string to floating point number conversion routines. Using this vulnerability an attacker could craft some malicious JavaScript code containing a very long string to be converted to a floating point number which would result in improper memory allocation and the execution of an arbitrary memory location. This vulnerability could thus be leveraged by the attacker to run arbitrary code on a victim's computer.
Update: The underlying flaw in the dtoa routines used
by Mozilla appears to be essentially the same as that reported against the
libc gdtoa routine by Maksymilian Arciemowicz.
Workaround
Disable JavaScript until a version containing these fixes can be installed.