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 Most of this content is highly out of date (some pages haven't been updated since the project began in 1998) and exists for historical purposes only.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 1.5.0.7) > MFSA 2006-57

Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2006-57

Title: JavaScript Regular Expression Heap Corruption
Impact: Critical
Announced: September 14, 2006
Reporter: Priit Laes, CanadianGuy, Girts Folkmanis, Catalin Patulea
Products: Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey

Fixed in: Firefox 1.5.0.7
  Thunderbird 1.5.0.7
  SeaMonkey 1.0.5

Description

Priit Laes reported a crash due to a heap buffer overflow triggered by a JavaScript regular expression containing a minimal quantifier. We presume this could be exploited to run arbitrary code.

CanadianGuy, Girts Folkmanis and Catalin Patulea report that a regular expression that ends with a backslash inside an unterminated character set (e.g. "[\\") will cause the regular epression engine to read beyond the end of the buffer, possibly leading to a crash.

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 enabling JavaScript in mail.

Workaround

Disable JavaScript until you can upgrade to a fixed version. Do not enable JavaScript in mail clients such as Thunderbird.

References