Arve Bersvendsen

Firefox URL Domain Name Buffer Overflow

Link: Firefox URL Domain Name Buffer Overflow

Tom Ferris has discovered a vulnerability in Firefox, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service) or potentially to compromise a users system.

The vulnerability is caused due to an error in the handling of an URL that contains the 0xAD character in its domain name. This can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow.

Successful exploitation crashes Firefox and may potentially allow code execution but requires that the user is tricked into visiting a malicious web site or open a specially crafted HTML file.

The vulnerability has been confirmed in version 1.0.6, and is reported to affect versions prior to 1.0.6, and version 1.5 Beta 1.

This security issue has been rated Highly Critical and the proposed solution is not to browse untrusted websites using Firefox.