Dirty dozen: Firefox ships patch for 12 security flaws

The Firefox 3.0.2 update addresses two issues rated by Mozilla to be "critical," meaning that the documented vulnerability can be used to run attacker code and install software, requiring no user interaction beyond normal browsing.

Here's the skinny from Mozilla's bulletins:

[ SEE: Talking Firefox security with Mozilla’s Window Snyder ]

• MFSA-2008-40 - Mozilla developer Paul Nickerson reported a variant of a click-hijacking vulnerability discovered in Internet Explorer by Liu Die Yu. The vulnerability allowed an attacker to move the content window while the mouse was being clicked, causing an item to be dragged rather than clicked-on. This issue could potentially be used to force a user to download a file or perform other drag-and-drop actions.
• MFSA-2008-41 - Mozilla security researcher moz_bug_r_a4 reported a series of vulnerabilities by which page content can pollute XPCNativeWrappers and have arbitrary code run with chrome privileges. One variant reported by moz_bug_r_a4 only affected Firefox 2.  Mozilla developer Olli Pettay reported that XSLT can create documents which do not have script handling objects. moz_bug_r_a4 also reported that document.loadBindingDocument() returns a document that does not have a script handling object. These issues could also be used by an attacker to run arbitrary script with chrome privileges.
• MFSA-2008-42 - Mozilla developers identified and fixed several stability bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. Some of these crashes showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code. Drew Yao of Apple Product Security reported two crashes in Mozilla image rendering code. This vulnerability only affected Firefox 3. David Maciejak also reported a crash in graphics rendering which only affected Firefox 3.
• MFSA-2008-43 - Microsoft developer Dave Reed reported that certain BOM characters are stripped from JavaScript code before it is executed. This can lead to code, which would otherwise be treated as part of a quoted string, to be executed. The issue could potentially be used by an attacker to bypass or evade script filters and perform an XSS attack. Security researcher Gareth Heyes reported an issue with the HTML parser in which the parser ignored certain low surrogate characters if they were HTML-escaped. This issue could potentially be used to bypass naive script filtering and used in an XSS attack. This issue only affected Firefox 2.
• MFSA-2008-44 -  Mozilla developer Boris Zbarsky reported that the resource: protocol allowed directory traversal on Linux when using URL-encoded slashes. Mozilla developer Georgi Guninski reported that the restrictions imposed on local HTML files could be bypassed using the resource: protocol. The vulnerability allowed an attacker to read information about the system and prompt the victim to save the information in a file.

[ ALSO SEE: Firefox scrambles to add ‘private mode’ browsing ]

The open-source group also released patches for multiple vulnerabilities affecting Firefox 2 but strongly recommends that users upgrade to Firefox 3.