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The Internet threat alert status is currently normal. At present, no major epidemics or other serious incidents have been recorded by Kaspersky Lab’s monitoring service. Internet threat level: 1

Mozilla Firefox 2 URI Launching Vulnerability


Secunia ID

SA31120

CVE-ID

CVE-2008-2933

Release Date

16 Jul 2008

Last Change

17 Jul 2008

Criticality

Less Critical

Solution Status

Vendor Patch

Software

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.x

Where

From remote

Impact
Exposure of sensitive information

Vulnerabilities where documents or credentials are leaked or can be revealed either locally or from remote.

Security Bypass

This covers vulnerabilities or security issues where malicious users or people can bypass certain security mechanisms of the application.

The actual impact varies significantly depending on the design and purpose of the affected application.

Description

A vulnerability has been reported in Firefox 2, which can be exploited by malicious people to bypass certain security restrictions and disclose sensitive information.

The problem is that it is possible to open multiple tabs via pipe symbols within the URI and can e.g. be exploited to launch "chrome:" URIs via the command-line. This can also be exploited to read files from a user's system using the "file:" URI but requires that an attacker is able to place a malicious file in a guessable location on a user's system (e.g. in combination with another security issue).

Successful exploitation requires that the URI is passed to Firefox from e.g. another browser and that Firefox is not running.

The vulnerability is reported in versions prior to 2.0.0.16.

Solution

Update to version 2.0.0.16.
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-older.html

Reported by

The vendor credits Billy Rios.

Original Advisory

MFSA 2008-35:
http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2008/mfsa2008-35.html