Firefox/Thunderbird: Mutliple Vulnerabilities
Firefox
A slew of firefox and mozilla vulnerabilities were made public yesterday and today.According to a Gento Security announcment:
"The following vulnerabilities were found and fixed in Mozilla Firefox:
* Mark Dowd from ISS X-Force reported an exploitable heap overrun in the GIF processing of obsolete Netscape extension 2 (CAN-2005-0399)
* Kohei Yoshino discovered that a page bookmarked as a sidebar could bypass privileges control (CAN-2005-0402)
* Michael Krax reported a new way to bypass XUL security restrictions through drag-and-drop of items like scrollbars (CAN-2005-0401)
Impact
=====
* The GIF heap overflow could be triggered by a malicious GIF image that would end up executing arbitrary code with the rights of the user running Firefox
* By tricking the user into bookmarking a malicious page as a Sidebar, a remote attacker could potentially execute arbitrary code with the rights of the user running the browser
* By setting up a malicious website and convincing users to obey very specific drag-and-drop instructions, attackers may leverage drag-and-drop features to bypass XUL security restrictions, which could be used as a stepping stone to exploit other vulnerabilities[image1_right]
For more information on current known vulnerabilties within firefox see Mozilla's known vulnerability listing complete with links to proof of concept code.
Note the Mozilla project recommends disabling java and upgrading to the latest version of mozilla/firefox. Currently 1.02
Thunderbird
There was also a slew of vulnerabilities released for the mozilla email/news client thunderbird. Also from a Gento security advisory:
The following vulnerabilities were found and fixed in Mozilla Thunderbird:
* Mark Dowd from ISS X-Force reported an exploitable heap overrun in the GIF processing of obsolete Netscape extension 2 (CAN-2005-0399)
* Daniel de Wildt and Gael Delalleau discovered a memory overwrite in a string library (CAN-2005-0255)
* Wind Li discovered a possible heap overflow in UTF8 to Unicode conversion (CAN-2005-0592)
* Phil Ringnalda reported a possible way to spoof Install source with user:pass@host (CAN-2005-0590)
Impact
======
The GIF heap overflow could be triggered by a malicious GIF image that would end up executing arbitrary code with the rights of the user running Thunderbird. The other overflow issues, while not thought to be exploitable, would have the same impact. Furthermore, by setting up malicious websites and convincing users to follow untrusted links, attackers may leverage the spoofing issue to trick user into installing malicious extensions.