Mozilla quashes first critical bug in Firefox 3.5, beats Microsoft to patch punch

Microsoft's IE ActiveX vulnerability, disclosed same day as Firefox's bug, not yet fixed

By Gregg Keizer, Computerworld, 07/17/09

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Mozilla late yesterday issued the first patch for Firefox 3.5, fixing a flaw that went public Monday. One noted contributor had called the flaw a "self-inflicted" vulnerability.

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Firefox 3.5.1 patches a critical flaw in the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine's Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler. "This could be exploited by an attacker to run arbitrary code such as installing malware," the accompanying security advisory warned.

Exploit code for the vulnerability was posted to the milw0rm.com malware site Monday, four days after Mozilla developers had discovered the bug and began working on a fix.

Andreas Gal, a project scientist at the University of California, Irvine -- and a key contributor to the TraceMonkey engine that Mozilla added to Firefox with Version 3.5 -- said that it appeared the hacker had created the attack code after spotting discussions and test cases on Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug- and change-tracking database. "Looking at the exploit code and our test cases, I think this is self-inflicted and we should have hidden the bug earlier," said Gal in one of several comments appended to the vulnerability's Bugzilla entry.

Although Mozilla had originally slated Firefox 3.5.1 for release later in the month, developers accelerated the schedule to plug the hole.

Thursday's update also addressed several unspecified stability issues and fixed a long-loading problem for some Windows users, according to Firefox 3.5.1's release notes.

Firefox 3.5.1 can be downloaded in Windows, Mac and Linux editions from Mozilla's site; current users can update by choosing "Check for Updates" under the "Help" menu.

While Mozilla rushed out a fix, rival Microsoft has yet to patch a bug that was publicly disclosed the same day -- Monday, July 13 -- that the attack code exploiting Firefox 3.5 hit the Web.

Hackers have been using a vulnerability in an ActiveX control used to publish Excel spreadsheets online and to display those in Internet Explorer, Microsoft's browser.

For more enterprise computing news, visit Computerworld. Story copyright Computerworld, Inc.

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