Vulnerability Note VU#141528

Mozilla products fail to properly handle JavaScript regular expressions

Overview

Mozilla products fail to properly handle certain JavaScript regular expressions. This vulnerability may allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial-of-service condition.

I. Description

According to Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-57:

...a regular expression that ends with a backslash inside an unterminated character set (e.g. "[\\") will cause the regular epression engine to read beyond the end of the buffer, possibly leading to a crash.

JavaScript must be enabled in order for this vulnerability to be exposed. JavaScript is enabled by default in the Firefox web browser, but not in the Mozilla Thunderbird email client. This vulnerability could be exploited in an affected web browser by viewing a specially crafted web page, or in an affected email client by viewing a specially crafted email message.

Note that this issue affects Mozilla Firefox, Thunderbird, and SeaMonkey.

II. Impact

A remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial-of-service condition.

III. Solution

Upgrade

This issue is addressed by Firefox 1.5.0.7, Thunderbird 1.5.0.7, and SeaMonkey 1.0.5.

Disable JavaScript

For instructions on how to disable JavaScript in Firefox, please refer to the Firefox section of the Securing Your Web Browser document.

Systems Affected

Vendor	Status	Date Notified	Date Updated
Mozilla, Inc.	Vulnerable	18-Sep-2006
SUSE Linux	Vulnerable	2-Oct-2006

References

http://secunia.com/advisories/21906/
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2006/mfsa2006-57.html

Credit

This issue was reported in Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-57. Mozilla credits Priit Laes, CanadianGuy, Girts Folkmanis, and Catalin Patulea for reporting this issue.

This document was written by Chris Taschner.

Other Information

Date Public:	2006-09-15
Date First Published:	2006-09-20
Date Last Updated:	2006-10-02
CERT Advisory:
CVE-ID(s):
NVD-ID(s):
US-CERT Technical Alerts:
Metric:	27.00
Document Revision:	22

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Produced 2006 by US-CERT, a government organization
Disclaimers and copyright information

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