Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2010-76
Title: Chrome privilege escalation with window.open and <isindex> element
Impact: Critical
Announced: December 9, 2010
Reporter: echo
Products: Firefox, SeaMonkey
Fixed in: Firefox 3.6.13
Firefox 3.5.16
SeaMonkey 2.0.11
Description
Security researcher echo reported that a web page could open a window with an about:blank location and then inject an <isindex> element into that page which upon submission would redirect to a chrome: document. The effect of this defect was that the original page would wind up with a reference to a chrome-privileged object, the opened window, which could be leveraged for privilege escalation attacks.
Mozilla security researcher moz_bug_r_a4 provided proof-of-concept code demonstrating how the above vulnerability could be used to run arbitrary code with chrome privileges.
References
* https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=609437
* CVE-2010-3771