Security researcher Abhishek Arya (Inferno) of the Google Chrome Security Team discovered a series critically rated of use-after-free and buffer overflow issues using the Address Sanitizer tool in shipped software. These issues are potentially exploitable, allowing for remote code execution. We would also like to thank Abhishek for reporting five additional use-after-free, out of bounds read, and buffer overflow flaws introduced during Firefox development that were fixed before general release.

In general these flaws cannot be exploited through email in the Thunderbird and SeaMonkey products because scripting is disabled, but are potentially a risk in browser or browser-like contexts in those products.

These issues affect Firefox 17 and Thunderbird 17 only.


External Reference:

http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2012/mfsa2012-105.html


Acknowledgements:

Red Hat would like to thank the Mozilla project for reporting this issue. Upstream acknowledges Abhishek Arya as the original reporter.

Statement:

This issue does not affect the version of firefox and thunderbird as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6