USN-1019-1: Firefox and Xulrunner vulnerabilities

9 December 2010

Firefox could be made to crash or run programs as your login if it opened a specially crafted website.

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Releases

Packages

Details

Jesse Ruderman, Andreas Gal, Nils, Brian Hackett, and Igor Bukanov
discovered several memory issues in the browser engine. An attacker could
exploit these to crash the browser or possibly run arbitrary code as the
user invoking the program. (CVE-2010-3776, CVE-2010-3777, CVE-2010-3778)

It was discovered that Firefox did not properly verify the about:blank
location elements when it was opened via window.open(). An attacker could
exploit this to run arbitrary code with chrome privileges. (CVE-2010-3771)

It was discovered that Firefox did not properly handle <div> elements
when processing a XUL tree. If a user were tricked into opening a malicious
web page, an attacker could exploit this to crash the browser or possibly
run arbitrary code as the user invoking the program. (CVE-2010-3772)

Marc Schoenefeld and Christoph Diehl discovered several problems when
handling downloadable fonts. The new OTS font sanitizing library was added
to mitigate these issues. (CVE-2010-3768)

Gregory Fleischer discovered that the Java LiveConnect script could be made
to run in the wrong security context. An attacker could exploit this to
read local files and run arbitrary code as the user invoking the program.
(CVE-2010-3775)

Several problems were discovered in the JavaScript engine. If a user were
tricked into opening a malicious web page, an attacker could exploit this to
crash the browser or possibly run arbitrary code as the user invoking the
program. (CVE-2010-3766, CVE-2010-3767, CVE-2010-3773)

Michal Zalewski discovered that Firefox did not always properly handle
displaying pages from network or certificate errors. An attacker could
exploit this to spoof the location bar, such as in a phishing attack.
(CVE-2010-3774)

Yosuke Hasegawa and Masatoshi Kimura discovered that several character
encodings would have some characters converted to angle brackets. An
attacker could utilize this to perform cross-site scripting attacks.
(CVE-2010-3770)

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Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

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Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 9.10
Ubuntu 8.04
Ubuntu 10.10
Ubuntu 10.04

After a standard system update you need to restart Firefox and any
applications which use Xulrunner to make all the necessary changes.

References

Related notices

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