TippingPoint Zero Day Initiative
 

Mozilla Firefox nsTreeContentView Dangling Pointer Remote Code Execution Vulnerability

ZDI-10-048: April 2nd, 2010

CVE ID

CVSS Score

Affected Vendors

Affected Products

TippingPoint™ IPS Customer Protection

TippingPoint IPS customers are protected against this vulnerability by Digital Vaccine protection filter ID 3377. For further product information on the TippingPoint IPS:

Vulnerability Details

This vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of Mozilla Firefox. User interaction is required in that the victim must visit a malicious website or be coerced into opening a malicious document.

The specific flaw exists within the way that Mozilla's Firefox parses .XUL files. While appending a particular tag to a treechildren container, the application will create more than one reference to a particular element without increasing its reference count. Upon removal of one of the elements, the refcount will be decreased causing the application to free the memory associated with the object. Due to the rogue reference occurring, the next time the application attempts to reference that container, the application will access memory that has been freed which can lead to code execution under the context of the application.

Vendor Response

Mozilla Firefox has issued an update to correct this vulnerability. More details can be found at:

Disclosure Timeline

    2010-01-06 - Vulnerability reported to vendor
    2010-04-02 - Coordinated public release of advisory

Credit

This vulnerability was discovered by:
    regenrecht