7.5 - USN-155-1

A security issue affects the following Ubuntu releases:

Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog) Ubuntu 5.04 (Hoary Hedgehog)

The following packages are affected:

mozilla-browser mozilla-mailnews

The problem can be corrected by upgrading the affected package to version 2:1.7.10-0ubuntu04.10 (for Ubuntu 4.10), or 2:1.7.10-0ubuntu05.04 (for Ubuntu 5.04). After a standard system upgrade you need to restart Mozilla to effect the necessary changes.

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)

It was discovered that a malicious website could inject arbitrary scripts into a target site by loading it into a frame and navigating back to a previous Javascript URL that contained an eval() call. This could be used to steal cookies or other confidential data from the target site. (MFSA 2005-42)

Michael Krax, Georgi Guninski, and L. David Baron found that the security checks that prevent script injection could be bypassed by wrapping a javascript: url in another pseudo-protocol like "view-source:" or "jar:". (CAN-2005-1531)

A variant of the attack described in CAN-2005-1160 (see USN-124-1) was discovered. Additional checks were added to make sure Javascript eval and script objects are run with the privileges of the context that created them, not the potentially elevated privilege of the context calling them. (CAN-2005-1532)

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)

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)

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)

The update for Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog) also fixes several vulnerabilities which are not present in the Ubuntu 5.04 version. Some of them could be exploited to execute arbitrary code with full user privileges if the user visited a malicious web site. (MFSA-2005-01 to MFSA-2005-41; please see the following web site for details: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vulnerabilities.html). We apologize for the huge delay of this update; we changed our update strategy for Mozilla products to make sure that such long delays will not happen again.