You are currently viewing a snapshot of www.mozilla.org taken on April 21, 2008. Most of this content is highly out of date (some pages haven't been updated since the project began in 1998) and exists for historical purposes only. If there are any pages on this archive site that you think should be added back to www.mozilla.org, please file a bug.

Skip to main content

You are here: Known Vulnerabilities in Mozilla Products (Firefox 1.5.0.5) > MFSA 2006-53

Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-53

Title: UniversalBrowserRead privilege escalation
Impact: Moderate
Announced: July 25, 2006
Reporter: shutdown
Products: Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey

Fixed in: Firefox 1.5.0.5
  Thunderbird 1.5.0.5
  SeaMonkey 1.0.3

Description

shutdown reports that scripts granted the UniversalBrowserRead privilege can leverage that into the equivalent of the far more powerful UniversalXPConnect since they are allowed to "read" into a privileged context. This allows the attacker the ability to run scripts with the full privelege of the user running the browser, possibly installing malware or snooping on private data. This has been fixed so that UniversalBrowserRead and UniversalBrowserWrite are limited to reading from and writing into only normally-privileged browser windows and frames.

Thunderbird shares the browser engine with Firefox and would be vulnerable if JavaScript were to be enabled in mail. This is not the default setting and we strongly discourage users from enabling JavaScript in mail.

Workaround

UniversalBrowserRead privileges should not be granted to sites found on the internet. Even after fixing this vulnerability that permission by design allows the privileged script to read potentially sensitive data from any other site it wishes, including those it opens without your knowledge (in a hidden frame, for example). You should grant enhanced privileges only when a trusted system administrator tells you that it is safe to do so.

References