Vulnerability Note VU#808216

Mozilla contains heap overflow in UTF8 conversion of hostname portion of URLs

Overview

A vulnerability in the way Mozilla and its derived programs handle certain malformed URLs could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.

I. Description

A vulnerability exists in the way that some versions of the Mozilla and Firefox web browsers, and Thunderbird email client handle long URLs containing non-ASCII characters. The vulnerability results from a buffer overflow error in heap memory that occurs during UTF8 conversion of the hostname portion of the URL. This vulnerability could be exploited by a remote attacker by supplying a specially crafted URL in a web page or email message.

II. Impact

A remote attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user running an affected program.

III. Solution

Upgrade to a fixed version of the affected software

The Mozilla Project has released new versions of the affected software that include patches for this vulnerability. Please see the Systems Affected section of this document for more information.

Systems Affected

Vendor	Status	Date Updated
Mozilla	Vulnerable	17-Sep-2004

References

http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=256316
http://secunia.com/advisories/12526/

Credit

Information about this issue was originally published by the Mozilla Project. The Mozilla Project, in turn, credits Ga�l Delalleau and Mats Palmgren with independent discoveries of this issue.

This document was written by Chad R Dougherty.

Other Information

Date Public	09/14/2004
Date First Published	09/17/2004 02:08:43 PM
Date Last Updated	09/17/2004
CERT Advisory
CVE Name
US-CERT Technical Alerts
Metric	28.59
Document Revision	7

If you have feedback, comments, or additional information about this vulnerability, please send us email.

Get Adobe Reader