Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2008-41

Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2008-41

Title: Privilege escalation via XPCnativeWrapper pollution
Impact: Critical
Announced: September 23, 2008
Reporter: moz_bug_r_a4, Olli Pettay
Products: Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey

Fixed in: Firefox 3.0.2
Firefox 2.0.0.17
Thunderbird 2.0.0.17
SeaMonkey 1.1.12
Description

Mozilla security researcher moz_bug_r_a4 reported a series of vulnerabilities by which page content can pollute XPCNativeWrappers and have arbitrary code run with chrome privileges. One variant reported by moz_bug_r_a4 only affected Firefox 2.

Mozilla developer Olli Pettay reported that XSLT can create documents which do not have script handling objects. moz_bug_r_a4 also reported that document.loadBindingDocument() returns a document that does not have a script handling object. These issues could also be used by an attacker to run arbitrary script with chrome privileges.

Thunderbird shares the browser engine with Firefox and could be vulnerable if JavaScript were to be enabled in mail. This is not the default setting and we strongly discourage users from running JavaScript in mail.
Workaround

Disable JavaScript until a version containing these fixes can be installed.
References

* XPCnativeWrapper pollution bugs
* CVE-2008-4058
* XPCnativeWrapper pollution (Firefox 2)
* CVE-2008-4059
* Documents without script handling objects
* CVE-2008-4060