Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2013-24

Web content bypass of COW and SOW security wrappers

Announced
February 19, 2013
Reporter
Bobby Holley
Impact
High
Products
Firefox, Firefox ESR, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird, Thunderbird ESR
Fixed in
  • Firefox 19
  • Firefox ESR 17.0.3
  • SeaMonkey 2.16
  • Thunderbird 17.0.3
  • Thunderbird ESR 17.0.3

Description

Mozilla developer Bobby Holley discovered that it was possible to bypass some protections in Chrome Object Wrappers (COW) and System Only Wrappers (SOW), making their prototypes mutable by web content. This could be used leak information from chrome objects and possibly allow for arbitrary code execution.

In general these flaws cannot be exploited through email in the Thunderbird and SeaMonkey products because scripting is disabled, but are potentially a risk in browser or browser-like contexts in those products.

References