Mozilla Fixes 10 Firefox Flaws, Half Seen as ‘Critical’
Posted by mylow on March 27, 2008
Mozilla patched 10 vulnerabilities, half of them marked “critical,” in its open-source browser as it updated Firefox to version 2.0.0.13. The new Mozilla Messaging spin-off, however, was not able to provide a matching update to its Thunderbird e-mail client, which shares five of the Firefox flaws that were fixed.
Mozilla’s six advisories spelled out five Firefox bugs marked “critical,” three tagged “high” and one each “moderate” and “low.”
“There’s a little bit here to interest most everyone,” said Andrew Storms, director of security operations at nCircle Network Security. “The bulletins claim no favor in the many types of vulnerabilities typically associated with browsers.”
Among the critical flaws were a pair that could be exploited to crash the browser or its JavaScript engine, and perhaps do more. “Some of these crashes 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,” Mozilla wrote in the advisory pegged as 2008-15.
Mozilla also patched potential identity leaks, spoofing bugs and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities in 2.0.0.13. But the fix that caught Storms’ eye was detailed by 2008-18, a fix for LiveConnect, a feature that harks back to Firefox’s predecessor, Netscape Navigator. LiveConnect lets Java applets call a Web page’s embedded JavaScript, or JavaScript access the Java runtime libraries, and is used by both Firefox and Apple Inc.’s Safari 3 browser.
“Sun has updated the Java Runtime Environment with a fix for this problem. Mozilla has also added a fix to LiveConnect to protect users who don’t have the latest version of Java,” Mozilla said in the advisory.
“Here we have Firefox putting out a mitigation step for a bug in Java,” said Storms. “It’s a welcomed addition when one vendor can help out another.”
