7.5 - USN-149-1

A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases:

Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog)

The following packages are affected:

mozilla-firefox

The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version 1.0.2-0ubuntu5.4. After a standard system upgrade you need to restart Firefox to effect the necessary changes.

Please note that the Ubuntu 4.10 version is also affected; an upgrade is in preparation.

Details follow:

Secunia.com reported that one of the recent security patches in Firefox reintroduced the frame injection patch that was originally known as CAN-2004-0718. This allowed a malicious web site to spoof the contents of other web sites. (CAN-2005-1937)

In several places the browser user interface did not correctly distinguish between true user events, such as mouse clicks or keystrokes, and synthetic events genenerated by web content. This could be exploited by malicious web sites to generate e. g. mouse clicks that install malicious plugins. Synthetic events are now prevented from reaching the browser UI entirely. (CAN-2005-2260)

Scripts in XBL controls from web content continued to be run even when Javascript was disabled. This could be combined with most script-based exploits to attack people running vulnerable versions who thought disabling Javascript would protect them. (CAN-2005-2261)

Matthew Mastracci discovered a flaw in the addons installation launcher. By forcing a page navigation immediately after calling the install method a callback function could end up running in the context of the new page selected by the attacker. This callback script could steal data from the new page such as cookies or passwords, or perform actions on the user's behalf such as make a purchase if the user is already logged into the target site. However, the default settings allow only http://addons.mozilla.org to bring up this install dialog. This could only be exploited if users have added untrustworthy sites to the installation whitelist, and if a malicious site can convince you to install from their site. (CAN-2005-2263)

Kohei Yoshino discovered a Javascript injection vulnerability in the sidebar. Sites can use the _search target to open links in the Firefox sidebar. A missing security check allowed the sidebar to inject "data:" URLs containing scripts into any page open in the browser. This could be used to steal cookies, passwords or other sensitive data. (CAN-2005-2264)

The function for version comparison in the addons installer did not properly verify the type of its argument. By passing specially crafted Javascript objects to it, a malicious web site could crash the browser and possibly even execute arbitrary code with the privilege of the user account Firefox runs in. (CAN-2005-2265)

A child frame can call top.focus() even if the framing page comes from a different origin and has overridden the focus() routine. Andreas Sandblad discovered that the call is made in the context of the child frame. This could be exploited to steal cookies and passwords from the framed page, or take actions on behalf of a signed-in user. However, web sites with above properties are not very common. (CAN-2005-2266)

Several media players, for example Flash and QuickTime, support scripted content with the ability to open URLs in the default browser. The default behavior for Firefox was to replace the currently open browser window's content with the externally opened content. Michael Krax discovered that if the external URL was a javascript: URL it would run as if it came from the site that served the previous content, which could be used to steal sensitive information such as login cookies or passwords. If the media player content first caused a privileged chrome: url to load then the subsequent javascript: url could execute arbitrary code. (CAN-2005-2267)

Alerts and prompts created by scripts in web pages were presented with the generic title [JavaScript Application] which sometimes made it difficult to know which site created them. A malicious page could exploit this by causing a prompt to appear in front of a trusted site in an attempt to extract information such as passwords from the user. In the fixed version these prompts contain the hostname of the page which created it. (CAN-2005-2268)

The XHTML DOM node handler did not take namespaces into account when verifying node types based on their names. For example, an XHTML document could contain an tag with malicious contents, which would then be processed as the standard trusted HTML tag. By tricking an user to view malicious web sites, this could be exploited to execute attacker-specified code with the full privileges of the user. (CAN-2005-2269)

It was discovered that some objects were not created appropriately. This allowed malicious web content scripts to trace back the creation chain until they found a privileged object and execute code with higher privileges than allowed by the current site. (CAN-2005-2270)