Vulnerability Note VU#559977

Mozilla products vulnerable to memory corruption in the browser engine

Overview

A number of vulnerabilities in the Mozilla browser engine may allow the execution of arbitrary code or denial of service.

I. Description

The Mozilla browser engine contains several vulnerabilities that may result in memory corruption. The impact of this memory corruption in specific cases is unclear. According to Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory MFSA 2007-29:

As part of the Firefox 2.0.0.8 update releases Mozilla developers fixed many bugs to improve the stability of the product. 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.

Information about the individual flaws causing the vulnerabilities addressed in this update can be found in the references section of this document.
Note that the Thunderbird email client also uses the Mozilla browser engine and could be affected by these vulnerabilities if JavaScript is enabled (it is disabled by default).

II. Impact

Potential impacts of these vulnerabilities include remote execution of arbitrary code and denial of service.

III. Solution

Upgrade

These vulnerabilities are addressed in Firefox 2.0.0.8, Thunderbird 2.0.0.8, and SeaMonkey 1.1.5.

Users that are unable to update should consider the following workaround:

Disable JavaScript

For instructions on how to disable JavaScript in Firefox, please refer to the Firefox section of the Securing Your Web Browser document.
Note that disabling JavaScript may not completely mitigate these vulnerabilities. Exploitation methods using JavaScript are common, however the Mozilla Security Team also suggests that other techniques such as large images could be used to exploit these vulnerabilities.

Systems Affected

Vendor	Status	Date Updated
Mozilla	Vulnerable	19-Oct-2007

References

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2007/mfsa2007-29.html
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?bug_id=309322,330563,341858,344064,348126,354645,361745,362901,378670,378682,379799,382376,384105,386382,386914,387033,387460,387844,391974,392285,393770,394014,394418

Credit

Thanks to Mozilla for reporting this vulnerability. Mozilla credits L. David Baron, Boris Zbarsky, Georgi Guninski, Paul Nickerson, Olli Pettay, Jesse Ruderman, Vladimir Sukhoy, Daniel Veditz, and Martijn Wargers with reporting these issues to them.

This document was written by Chad R Dougherty.

Other Information

Date Public	10/19/2007
Date First Published	10/19/2007 03:20:46 PM
Date Last Updated	10/19/2007
CERT Advisory
CVE Name	CVE-2007-5339
Metric	10.13
Document Revision	10