Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-57

JavaScript Regular Expression Heap Corruption

Announced

September 14, 2006

Reporter

Priit Laes, CanadianGuy, Girts Folkmanis, Catalin Patulea

Impact

Critical

Products

Firefox, SeaMonkey, Thunderbird

Fixed in

• Firefox 1.5.0.7
• SeaMonkey 1.0.5
• Thunderbird 1.5.0.7

Description

Priit Laes reported a crash due to a heap buffer overflow triggered by a JavaScript regular expression containing a minimal quantifier. We presume this could be exploited to run arbitrary code.

CanadianGuy, Girts Folkmanis and Catalin Patulea report that a regular expression that ends with a backslash inside an unterminated character set (e.g. "[\\") will cause the regular epression engine to read beyond the end of the buffer, possibly leading to a crash.

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 enabling JavaScript in mail.

Workaround

Disable JavaScript until you can upgrade to a fixed version. Do not enable JavaScript in mail clients such as Thunderbird.

References

• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=346090
  CVE-2006-4565
• https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=346794
  CVE-2006-4566