Vulnerability Note VU#897540

Mozilla products VCard attachment buffer overflow

Original Release date: 27 Jul 2006 | Last revised: 09 Feb 2007

Overview

Mozilla products fail to properly handle malformed VCard attachments, which allows a buffer overflow to occur. This vulnerability may allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.

Description

According to Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-49:

    A VCard attachment with a malformed base64 field (such as a photo) can trigger a heap buffer overwrite. These have proven exploitable in the past, though in this case the overwrite is accompanied by an integer underflow that would attempt to copy more data than the typical machine has, leading to a crash.

For more information and a complete list of affected products, refer to Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-49.

Impact

A remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system. The attacker could also cause the vulnerable application to crash.

Solution

Apply an update
This vulnerability is addressed in Thunderbird 1.5.0.5 and SeaMonkey 1.0.3 according to the Mozilla Foundation Security Update 2006-49.


Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-49, suggests the following workarounds:

  • Turn off the inline display of attachments.
  • Do not click on or open VCard attachments.

Systems Affected (Learn More)

VendorStatusDate NotifiedDate Updated
Mozilla, Inc.Affected-27 Jul 2006
If you are a vendor and your product is affected, let us know.

CVSS Metrics (Learn More)

Group Score Vector
Base N/A N/A
Temporal N/A N/A
Environmental N/A N/A

References

Credit

This vulnerability was reported in Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-49.

This document was written by Jeff Gennari.

Other Information

  • CVE IDs: CVE-2006-3804
  • Date Public: 25 Jul 2006
  • Date First Published: 27 Jul 2006
  • Date Last Updated: 09 Feb 2007
  • Severity Metric: 6.15
  • Document Revision: 18

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