USN-157-1: Mozilla Thunderbird vulnerabilities

Releases

• Ubuntu 5.04
• Ubuntu 4.10

Details

Vladimir V. Perepelitsa discovered a bug in Thunderbird's handling of anonymous
functions during regular expression string replacement. A malicious HTML email
could exploit this to capture a random block of client memory. (CAN-2005-0989)

Georgi Guninski discovered that the types of certain XPInstall related
JavaScript objects were not sufficiently validated when they were called. This
could be exploited by malicious HTML email content to crash Thunderbird or even
execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user. (CAN-2005-1159)

Thunderbird did not properly verify the values of XML DOM nodes. By tricking
the user to perform a common action like clicking on a link or opening the
context menu, a malicious HTML email could exploit this to execute arbitrary
JavaScript code with the full privileges of the user. (CAN-2005-1160)

A variant of the attack described in CAN-2005-1160 (see USN-124-1) was
discovered. Additional checks were added to make sure Javascript eval and
script objects are run with the privileges of the context that created them,
not the potentially elevated privilege of the context calling them.
(CAN-2005-1532)

Scripts in XBL controls from web content continued to be run even when
Javascript was disabled. This could be combined with most script-based exploits
to attack people running vulnerable versions who thought disabling Javascript
would protect them. (CAN-2005-2261)

The function for version comparison in the addons installer did not properly
verify the type of its argument. By passing specially crafted Javascript
objects to it, a malicious web site could crash Thunderbird and possibly even
execute arbitrary code with the privilege of the user account Thunderbird runs
in. (CAN-2005-2265)

The XHTML DOM node handler did not take namespaces into account when verifying
node types based on their names. For example, an XHTML email could contain an

tag with malicious contents, which would then be processed as the
standard trusted HTML tag. By tricking an user to view a malicious email,
this could be exploited to execute attacker-specified code with the full
privileges of the user. (CAN-2005-2269)

It was discovered that some objects were not created appropriately. This
allowed malicious web content scripts to trace back the creation chain until
they found a privileged object and execute code with higher privileges than
allowed by the current site. (CAN-2005-2270)

Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña discovered that the run-mozilla.sh script
created temporary files in an unsafe way when running with 'debugging' enabled.
This could allow a symlink attack to create or overwrite arbitrary files with
the privileges of the user invoking the program.
(CAN-2005-2353)

The update for Ubuntu 4.10 (Warty Warthog) also fixes several less
critical vulnerabilities which are not present in the Ubuntu 5.04
version. (MFSA-2005-02 to MFSA-2005-30; please see the following web
site for details:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/known-vulnerabilities.html).
We apologize for the huge delay of this update; we changed our update
strategy for Mozilla products to make sure that such long delays will
not happen again.

Update instructions

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

Ubuntu 5.04

• mozilla-thunderbird -
• mozilla-thunderbird-enigmail -

Ubuntu 4.10

• mozilla-thunderbird -
• mozilla-thunderbird-enigmail -

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

• CVE-2005-2353
• CVE-2005-1159
• CVE-2005-0989
• CVE-2005-1160
• CVE-2005-1532
• CVE-2005-2261
• CVE-2005-2265
• CVE-2005-2269
• CVE-2005-2270

Related notices

• USN-149-3
• USN-124-1
• USN-155-1
• USN-134-1
• USN-149-1