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Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2014-35

Privilege escalation through Mozilla Maintenance Service Installer

Announced
April 29, 2014
Reporter
Ash
Impact
High
Products
Firefox, Firefox ESR
Fixed in
  • Firefox 29
  • Firefox ESR 24.5

Description

Security researcher Ash reported an issue affected the Mozilla Maintenance Service on Windows systems. The Mozilla Maintenance Service installer writes to a temporary directory created during the update process which is writable by users. If malicious DLL files are placed within this directory during the update process, these DLL files can run in a privileged context through the Mozilla Maintenance Service's privileges, allowing for local privilege escalation.

This issue does not affect Linux or OS X users and is confined to Windows.

References