Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2013-32
Privilege escalation through Mozilla Maintenance Service
- Announced
- April 2, 2013
- Reporter
- Frédéric Hoguin
- Impact
- High
- Products
- Firefox, Firefox ESR, Thunderbird, Thunderbird ESR
- Fixed in
-
- Firefox 20
- Firefox ESR 17.0.5
- Thunderbird 17.0.5
- Thunderbird ESR 17.0.5
Description
Security researcher Frédéric Hoguin discovered that the Mozilla Maintenance Service on Windows was vulnerable to a buffer overflow. This system is used to update software without invoking the User Account Control (UAC) prompt. The Mozilla Maintenance Service is configured to allow unprivileged users to start it with arbitrary arguments. By manipulating the data passed in these arguments, an attacker can execute arbitrary code with the system privileges used by the service. This issue requires local file system access to be exploitable.