When white hat hackers point out flaws in your product, it’s for your own good and you should take advantage of it before the bad guys do. Mozilla is doing just that. Days after hacks were exposed in the Pwn2Own contest, it is pushing out fixes for Mozilla 3.6. eSecurity Planet has details on the hack and the fix.
Mozilla isn’t wasting any time in its efforts to protect users against new security risks.
Last week, Mozilla’s open source Firefox Web browser was publicly exploited in the Pwn2own hacking competition at the CanSecWest security conference. Late on Thursday, Mozilla moved to fix the Pwn2own flaw with the Firefox 3.6.3 update.
The problem — a memory corruption flaw that Mozilla titled “Re-use of freed object due to scope confusion” — could lead to arbitrary code execution. The flaw was publicly demonstrated at Pwn2own by security researcher “Nils” of MWR InfoSecurity.
“By moving DOM nodes between documents, Nils found a case where the moved node incorrectly retained its old scope,” Mozilla stated in its security advisory. “If garbage collection could be triggered at the right time then Firefox would later use this freed object.”
