Description of problem:

The recent update of firefox on Fedora 10 to version 3.0.14 resulted in the startup page reporting that the Flash Plugin was out of date, and needed an upgrade. This is due to a recent policy change by Mozilla, as referred to here:

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2009/09/17/firefox_users_with_vulnerable_flash/

Upon more detailed examination of the problem, I found that the plugin registration "database" in:

    ~/.mozilla/firefox/default.mzd/pluginreg.dat

referred to Flash Plugin version 10.0.22, 

    "Shockwave Flash 10.0 r22"

even though the flash-plugin RPM was version 10.0.32.18. Moreover, "about:plugins" from Firefox also referenced the "Shockwave Flash 10.0 r22" string in its listings.

To work round the problem, I shutdown Firefox, manually removed the pluginreg.dat file, and re-launched Firefox. As a result, both "about:plugins" and the pluginreg.dat file were updated to refer the current version number of the Flash Plugin. At the same time, the version number of MozPlugger was also updated to reflect the true RPM version, as in this string change in pluginreg.dat:

-MozPlugger version 1.10.1, written by Fredrik H&uuml;binette, Louis Bavoil and Peter Leese.<br>For documentation on how to configure mozplugger, check the man page.
+MozPlugger version 1.12.1, written by Fredrik H&uuml;binette, Louis Bavoil and Peter Leese.<br>For documentation on how to configure mozplugger, check the man page.


Since this issue is now more serious, as the erroneous version numbers cause Firefox to mistakenly admonish users about a vulnerable Flash plugin, I think it would be worth ensuring that the pluginreg.dat is kept more accurately up to date.

As a simple workround, when I found a similar issue under Fedora Core 6, I added an /etc/profile.d script to auto-remove the file at login, so that Firefox was forced to update it at launch.

The proper fix would presumably involve code changes in Firefox itself which check timestamps and checksums on all plugins, and update pluginreg.dat when anything is seen to have changed.

Suggested /etc/profile.d/firefox script:

...
# Fixup plugin database by removing it at login and relying
# on an auto-rebuild

[ -d ~/.mozilla ] || exit 0
for f in `find ~/.mozilla -name pluginreg.dat -print 2>/dev/null`
do
  rm -f $f
done
...


Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

firefox-3.0.14
flash-plugin-10.0.32.18