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Mozilla XPCOM Library Race Condition
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SUMMARY
xpcom, or cross platform component object model is a framework for writing
cross-platform, modular software. The xpcom library is used in many
applications including a majority of the popular browsers such as FireFox,
NetScape, Mozilla, Galeon, etc. It seems that there is a race condition of
sorts in xpcom that makes it possible for an attacker to crash a victims
browser by having them view a malformed HTML document. This issue is not
believed to be exploitable by the Mozilla dev team, and will likely be
addressed in full at a later date by the development team.
DETAILS
XPCOM Race Condition:
It is possible for an attacker to create a race condition that will cause
an access violation and result in a hard crash of the browser. One way to
trigger this issue is by taking a decent sized HTML file and loading a DOM
call within some nested divs that will cause part of the page currently
being rendered to be deleted. If the page has not loaded by the time the
DOM call is made then we can delete objects that have yet to be
referenced, which will result in a crash as soon as the browser tries to
reference the deleted object.
<http://www.gulftech.org/wrecko.html> http://www.gulftech.org/wrecko.html
The above link is a simple proof of concept James wrote a few months ago
to show the developers how the issue could be used to cause a crash of the
affected web browser. Due to time constraints James has not got to look
into this issue very in depth, but it may be possible to use the race
condition described here in combination with other DOM calls or JavaScript
to produce different results than those demonstrated in his proof of
concept HTML page.
Solution:
Mozilla have been aware of this issue for some months, and have fixed the
issue on trunk, but not on branch. The reason for this as stated by one of
the developers is "fixes for this stuff could easily cause regressions".
James did test this issue on the latest copy of the Mozilla browser (Deer
Park) this morning though, and it seemed to NOT be vulnerable. However,
Firefox and the like are still affected.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
The information has been provided by <mailto:security@gulftech.org>
GulfTech Security Research.
The original article can be found at:
<http://www.gulftech.org/?node=research&article_id=00091-07212005>
http://www.gulftech.org/?node=research&article_id=00091-07212005
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