10 - MDVSA-2009:290

Security issues were identified and fixed in firefox 3.0.x:

Security researcher Alin Rad Pop of Secunia Research reported a heap-based buffer overflow in Mozilla's string to floating point number conversion routines. Using this vulnerability an attacker could craft some malicious JavaScript code containing a very long string to be converted to a floating point number which would result in improper memory allocation and the execution of an arbitrary memory location. This vulnerability could thus be leveraged by the attacker to run arbitrary code on a victim's computer (CVE-2009-1563).

Security researcher Jeremy Brown reported that the file naming scheme used for downloading a file which already exists in the downloads folder is predictable. If an attacker had local access to a victim's computer and knew the name of a file the victim intended to open through the Download Manager, he could use this vulnerability to place a malicious file in the world-writable directory used to save temporary downloaded files and cause the browser to choose the incorrect file when opening it. Since this attack requires local access to the victim's machine, the severity of this vulnerability was determined to be low (CVE-2009-3274).

Security researcher Paul Stone reported that a user's form history, both from web content as well as the smart location bar, was vulnerable to theft. A malicious web page could synthesize events such as mouse focus and key presses on behalf of the victim and trick the browser into auto-filling the form fields with history entries and then reading the entries (CVE-2009-3370).

Security researcher Marco C. reported a flaw in the parsing of regular expressions used in Proxy Auto-configuration (PAC) files. In certain cases this flaw could be used by an attacker to crash a victim's browser and run arbitrary code on their computer. Since this vulnerability requires the victim to have PAC configured in their environment with specific regular expresssions which can trigger the crash, the severity of the issue was determined to be moderate (CVE-2009-3372).

Security research firm iDefense reported that researcher regenrecht discovered a heap-based buffer overflow in Mozilla's GIF image parser. This vulnerability could potentially be used by an attacker to crash a victim's browser and run arbitrary code on their computer (CVE-2009-3373).

Mozilla security researcher moz_bug_r_a4 reported that the XPCOM utility XPCVariant::VariantDataToJS unwrapped doubly-wrapped objects before returning them to chrome callers. This could result in chrome privileged code calling methods on an object which had previously been created or modified by web content, potentially executing malicious JavaScript code with chrome privileges (CVE-2009-3374).

Security researcher Gregory Fleischer reported that text within a selection on a web page can be read by JavaScript in a different domain using the document.getSelection function, violating the same-origin policy. Since this vulnerability requires user interaction to exploit, its severity was determined to be moderate (CVE-2009-3375).

Mozilla security researchers Jesse Ruderman and Sid Stamm reported that when downloading a file containing a right-to-left override character (RTL) in the filename, the name displayed in the dialog title bar conflicts with the name of the file shown in the dialog body. An attacker could use this vulnerability to obfuscate the name and file extension of a file to be downloaded and opened, potentially causing a user to run an executable file when they expected to open a non-executable file (CVE-2009-3376).

Mozilla developers and community members identified and fixed several stability bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. 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. Vladimir Vukicevic, Jesse Ruderman, Martijn Wargers, Daniel Banchero, David Keeler, and Boris Zbarsky reported crashes in the browser engine which affected both Firefox 3 and Firefox 3.5 (CVE-2009-3380). Carsten Book reported a crash in the browser engine which affected only Firefox 3 (CVE-2009-3382).

This update provides the latest Mozilla Firefox 3.0.x to correct these issues.

Additionally, some packages which require so, have been rebuilt and are being provided as updates.