Mozilla products vulnerable to memory corruption via large regular expression in JavaScript

Overview

A vulnerability in the way the JavaScript engine of Mozilla products and derivative programs handles a large regular expression could allow a remote attacker to crash the application or execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.

Description

A regular expression is a special text string for describing a search pattern. The JavaScript interpreter in the Mozilla browser and derived products includes the ability to process regular expressions. An integer overflow vulnerability has been discovered in the way that some versions of these products handle and overly large regular expression. According to Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-11:

As part of the Firefox 1.5 release we fixed several crash bugs to improve the stability of the product. Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption that we presume could be exploited to run arbitrary code and have been applied to the Firefox 1.0.x and Mozilla Suite 1.7.x releases
[…]
Alden D’Souza reported a crash when using an extremely large regular expression in JavaScript. This was tracked down to a 16-bit integer overflow that could potentially cause the browser to interpret attacker supplied data as JavaScript bytecode.
[…]
Note: 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.

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Impact

Remote attackers may be able to crash a vulnerable program or run code of their choosing on an affected system. The attacker-supplied code would be executed with the permissions of the user running the vulnerable program.

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Solution

Upgrade

The Mozilla Foundation has published Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-11 in response to this issue. Users are encouraged to review this advisory and upgrade to the fixed versions of the products it describes.

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Workarounds

Users, particularly those who are unable to upgrade to a fixed version of the software, are encouraged to disable JavaScript in the affected programs.

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Vendor Information

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Mozilla, Inc. __ Affected

Notified: April 17, 2006 Updated: April 17, 2006

Status

Affected

Vendor Statement

We have not received a statement from the vendor.

Vendor Information

The vendor has not provided us with any further information regarding this vulnerability.

Addendum

The Mozilla Foundation has published Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-11 in response to this issue. Users are encouraged to review this advisory and upgrade to the fixed versions of the products it describes.

If you have feedback, comments, or additional information about this vulnerability, please send us [email](<mailto:[email protected]?Subject=VU%23329500 Feedback>).

Red Hat, Inc. __ Affected

Updated: April 17, 2006

Status

Affected

Vendor Statement

We have not received a statement from the vendor.

Vendor Information

The vendor has not provided us with any further information regarding this vulnerability.

Addendum

Red Hat, Inc. has pubished Red Hat Security Advisory RHSA-2006:0328 in response to this issue. Users are encouraged to review this advisory and apply the patches it refers to.

If you have feedback, comments, or additional information about this vulnerability, please send us [email](<mailto:[email protected]?Subject=VU%23329500 Feedback>).

CVSS Metrics

Group	Score	Vector
Base	0	AV:–/AC:–/Au:–/C:–/I:–/A:–
Temporal	0	E:ND/RL:ND/RC:ND
Environmental	0	CDP:ND/TD:ND/CR:ND/IR:ND/AR:ND

References

<http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2006/mfsa2006-11.html&gt;

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory for reporting this vulnerability. The Mozilla Foundation, in turn, credits Alden D’Souza for reporting the underlying bug to them.

This document was written by Chad Dougherty based on information supplied by the Mozilla Foundation.

Other Information

CVE IDs:	CVE-2006-1737
Severity Metric:	12.24 Date Public: