Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2011-32

Security issues addressed in Thunderbird 3.1.12

Announced

August 16, 2011

Impact

Critical

Products

Thunderbird

Fixed in

• Thunderbird 3.1.12

Many of the issues listed below are not exploitable through mail since JavaScript is disabled by default in Thunderbird. These particular issues may be triggered while viewing RSS feeds and displaying full remote content rather than the feed summary. Addons that expose browser functionality may also enable such issues to be exploited.

Miscellaneous memory safety hazards (rv:1.9.2.20)

Impact: Critical
Description: Mozilla developers and community members identified and fixed several memory safety bugs in the browser engine used in Thunderbird 3.1 and other Mozilla-based products. Some of these bugs 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.

References:

Gary Kwong, Igor Bukanov, Nils and Bob Clary reported memory safety issues which affected Thunderbird 3.1.

• Memory safety bugs - Thunderbird 3.1
• CVE-2011-2982

Crash in SVGTextElement.getCharNumAtPosition()

Impact: Critical
Description: Security researcher regenrecht reported via TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative that a SVG text manipulation routine contained a dangling pointer vulnerability.

References:

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=648094
• CVE-2011-0084

Privilege escalation using event handlers

Impact: Critical
Description: Mozilla security researcher moz_bug_r_a_4 reported a vulnerability in event management code that would permit JavaScript to be run in the wrong context, including that of a different website or potentially in a chrome-privileged context.

References:

• Event handler privilege escalation bugs
• CVE-2011-2981

Dangling pointer vulnerability in appendChild

Impact: Critical
Description: Security researcher regenrecht reported via TippingPoint's Zero Day Initiative that appendChild did not correctly account for DOM objects it operated upon and could be exploited to dereference an invalid pointer.

References:

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=648065
• CVE-2011-2378

Privilege escalation dropping a tab element in content area

Impact: Critical
Description: Mozilla security researcher moz_bug_r_a4 reported that web content could receive chrome privileges if it registered for drop events and a browser tab element was dropped into the content area.

References:

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=572129
• CVE-2011-2984

Binary planting vulnerability in ThinkPadSensor::Startup

Impact: High
Description: Security researcher Mitja Kolsek of Acros Security reported that ThinkPadSensor::Startup could potentially be exploited to load a malicious DLL into the running process.

References:

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=642469
• CVE-2011-2980

Private data leakage using RegExp.input

Impact: High
Description: Security researcher shutdown reported that data from other domains could be read when RegExp.input was set.

References:

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=626297
• CVE-2011-2983