USN-728-1: Firefox and Xulrunner vulnerabilities

Ubuntu Security Notice USN-728-1

5th March, 2009

firefox-3.0, xulrunner-1.9 vulnerabilities

A security issue affects these releases of Ubuntu and its derivatives:

  • Ubuntu 8.10
  • Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

Software description

  • firefox-3.0
  • xulrunner-1.9

Details

Glenn Randers-Pehrson discovered that the embedded libpng in Firefox
did not properly initialize pointers. If a user were tricked into
viewing a malicious website with a crafted PNG file, a remote attacker
could cause a denial of service or possibly execute arbitrary code
with the privileges of the user invoking the program. (CVE-2009-0040)

Martijn Wargers, Jesse Ruderman, Josh Soref, Gary Kwong, and Timothee
Groleau discovered flaws in the browser engine. If a user were tricked
into viewing a malicious website, a remote attacker could cause a
denial of service or possibly execute arbitrary code with the
privileges of the user invoking the program. (CVE-2009-0771,
CVE-2009-0772, CVE-2009-0773, CVE-2009-0774)

A flaw was discovered in Firefox's garbage collection process. Under
certain circumstances a remote attacker could exploit this to cause a
denial of service or possibly execute arbitrary code with the
privileges of the user invoking the program. (CVE-2009-0775)

Georgi Guninski discovered a flaw when Firefox performed a
cross-domain redirect. An attacker could bypass the same-origin policy
in Firefox by utilizing nsIRDFService and steal private data from
users authenticated to the redirected website. (CVE-2009-0776)

Masahiro Yamada discovered that Firefox did not display control
characters in the location bar. An attacker could exploit this to
spoof the location bar, such as in a phishing attack. (CVE-2009-0777)

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package version:

Ubuntu 8.10:
firefox-3.0 3.0.7+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1
abrowser 3.0.7+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1
xulrunner-1.9 1.9.0.7+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.10.1
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS:
firefox-3.0 3.0.7+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.1
xulrunner-1.9 1.9.0.7+nobinonly-0ubuntu0.8.04.1

To update your system, please follow these instructions: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Upgrades.

After a standard system upgrade you need to restart Firefox and any
applications that use xulrunner, such as Epiphany, to effect the necessary
changes.

References

CVE-2009-0040, CVE-2009-0771, CVE-2009-0772, CVE-2009-0773, CVE-2009-0774, CVE-2009-0775, CVE-2009-0776, CVE-2009-0777