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Critical Mozilla, Thunderbird Vulnerabilities
d3ik writes "An advisory has been issued on several buffer overflow exploits in the Mozilla and Thunderbird code. Coincidentally, one of the exploits takes advantage of a unchecked buffer in the bitmap parser, very similar to recent Microsoft JPEG vulnerability.
The good news is that if you have an updated version (Mozilla 1.7.3, Firefox 1.0PR, Thunderbird 0.8) you won't be affected."
Afterall, it's Microsoft's fault when their users don't keep up to date with security patches.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
.....you can patch without fear of breaking a gazillion programs.
-Randy
Here's why:
Software is written by humans. As a result, mistakes are bound to be made. Various software design strategies merely mitigate and minimize those risks, but it's bound to happen. This is a fundamental fact of life. Deal with it.
However, OSS permits investigation and transparency in the resulting software. This leads to better code reviews (hopefully) and more bug fixes. In addition, there is nothing that a software development team or company can hide behind (a la IP rights) all the while shouting, "Shut up! Shut up! I can't hear you! la la la la!"
If I use Internet Explorer, I can deploy patches to every amchine on the domain automagically using software like Shavlik's HfNetChk - with Moz I'd have to take a trip round the desktops, forty or fifty upgrades is something I don't fancy.
The Moz team should be looking with urgency at how corporate customers can keep it up to date - I'm sure that would also make it a much easier sell to business.
There are no known exploits on macs.
:-)
Just buy a mac
Plus it runs great Microsoft applications like Excel and Internet Explorer.
Except the similar MS bug is already patched. And yet people were still quite pissed about it a few hours ago.
I cannot ask my father to uninstall his browser and reinstall a new one every so often. If Firefox wants to be accepted by the large crowd out there it definitely needs an automatic update.
michael at slashdot.org: The real answer is that a couple of the slashdot authors are sick.
I wasn't notified of this critical vulnerability until I checked slashdot. Perhaps FFox/Moz should have a feature that automatically checks for updates and recommends them appropriately?
I hate to download yet again all 11 megabytes just because of a single bug.
The owls are not what they seem
We've found a bug in firefox, we're really sorry. Anyone using old versions of firefox will be affected./I.
That is, unless they decide to sit on it for a few years debating if they should fix it...
And here's the additional difference:
We're going to fix this Firefox bug, and it doesn't matter if it wipes your preferences and breaks your extensions. Your loss for using beta software.
We're going to fix this IE bug and try to make sure it doesn't break existing installs.
I use Firefox, but haven't upgraded from 0.8. I got tired of having to reset my preferences and extensions with each update. I'll take the time to upgrade when it gets to 1.0.
But Micro$oft themselves have said they're planning on moving to a monthly patch cycle. So you could suffer from a critical vulnerability for about 30 days before receiving a fix.
...
I wouldn't surprised if hackers even try to take advantage of this cycle in some way
Yeah, that is a loss of using beta software. If you're using firefox you're a beta tester, which comes with all sorts of drawbacks like that.
They're at the stage where they make large sweeping changes quickly. Once they hit production they should no longer do that... but until then, it comes with the terroritory... personally I'm amazed, and think it speaks greatly to the quality of Firefox and the lack of quality of IE that Firefox has such a showing in a beta state.
Well actually buffer overflows are inherent problems in C/C++ because they allow programmers to make those kind of errors.
Java on the other hand does not allow programmers to make that error. If more people used better tools it would mean less security problmens.
Just saying it like it are.
The good news is that if you have an updated version (Mozilla 1.7.3, Firefox 1.0PR, Thunderbird 0.8) you won't be affected.
So, any version prior to the "Preview Release" of Firefox is vulnerable.
In case you don't know, that's the version not guaranteed for stability, so who knows what'll break.
Well, at least the developers are reacting with some option for the user.
If you RTFA, and scroll to the botttom, you'll notice they link to all of the relevant Bugzilla entries for the reported problems.
Read them. Do you know how these flaws were found? By people looking at the source code and reporting them. The people who detected the problems couldn't have found them if the source was closed.
This is Open Source at its finest. On the other hand, we have the flaws in IE that are all too often found after someone has created an exploit and it's in the wild.
Personally, I wouldn't mind one bit if Mozilla users and Open Source developers found a security problem once per hour and got the problem fixed quickly. It's vastly better than the closed-source alternative where you have to hope that someone without access to the source reports the fault when they find it, and that Microsoft doesn't take their own sweet time fixing it.
Once again, Open Source at its finest.
Yaz.
The safest and best thing is to use a real VM, like the JVM. Another alternative is to use something like Cyclone which also doesn't allow unsafe memory operations.
To all the ditto-heads who keep on saying "if it's not in C, it's too slow", wasn't there just an article on Slashdot a few days ago about full-motion video players written in pure Java? Surely a jpeg here and there shouldn't be too much of a problem?
so when are we going to be able to update firefox/thunderbird without reinstalling the entire app? I'm sick and tire of this because I also have to reinstall every single extensions and themes I use. Sure I can do this easily, but it's a pain in the ass when I have to tell my not-so-tech-savvy friends to upgrade. it's tedious and stupid. and god bless those poor souls who have to upgrade a whole network of machines.
mozilla.org really needs to include a link to their Security Centre on their front page.
As FireFox and Mozilla become more widely used, we will truly see how well the open source community can keep up. After all, I honestly believe that the reason more bugs and fulnerabilities are found in IE is that it is more widely used.
I see the day not too far off when FireFox could overtake IE in the market...so will the majority of problems then be in FireFox, or is microsoft really writing bad code? It will be interesting to see.
I believe the open source community will be up to the task of maintaining the bugs as they come in, but I think we will see that there will still be a lot of these types of serious problems that crop up once there are thousands of people dedicating their lives to exploiting them.
Grab a chair, sit back and watch the fun.
"The good news is that if you have an updated version (Mozilla 1.7.3, Firefox 1.0PR, Thunderbird 0.8) you won't be affected."
And the good news is if you have the updated version of Windows (Windowws XP SP2) then you aren't affected by the similar critical flaw either but it's different when it's OSS huh?
Three words to all the Microsoft player-haters: Pot kettle black.
It all comes down to this: The more POPULAR your software is, the more BUGS will be revealed. Leave motive out of the equation.
GetTheJob.com : Nothing but Real Jobs.
We've found a bug in firefox, we're really sorry. Anyone using old versions of firefox will be affected.
We've found a bug in internet explorer, we're really sorry. We'll fix it... eventually.
The only difference here is when they decided to announce the flaw.
Mozilla decided to keep it secret until a new version was released. Don't you find that at least slightly scary?
Look when this security exploit was filed: #226669.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Before I get declared a Microsoft shill I would like to say that a vast majority of the software I run is F/OSS. I just want a certain consistency when people attack Microsoft and laud the F/OSS movement.
You want to know who isn't running Firefox 2.x? They spell it "definately" and "rediculous".
All those critical bugs have been detected by reviewers from the "Security Bug Bounty Program", as described on mozilla.org. The Mozilla Foundation has offered a $500 bounty for each security bug found, and already has secured a $10,000 budget to do so.
Thus, all those bugs should not be seen as a proof that the Mozilla code is badly written, but rather that the Mozilla Foundation is aware that secure code is hard to write, and that a good review process is critical to reach this goal.
And thats why Open Source is better! find it one day patch it the next.
Nimbda and Code Red both came out after patches had been available for months. I don't see this as positive or negative for Open Source.
At the end of the day--regardless of platform, it comes down to someone actually installing the patch!
Another difference is, M.org actually releases the new version. Microsoft may or may not. If M.org doesn't for some reason, you can hire a programmer to close the hole for your organization.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"Diversity" and "Open Source" are not mutually exclusive. I don't disagree that diversity in software can be highly benificial -- that's why on my personal network I run 5 different OS's (three of them being different Linux distros).
However, you can have diversity and still be Open Source. Mozilla is hardly the only Open Source browser out there, nor is it the only Open Source rendering engine. Links is Open Source as well, and similarily benifits from many people being able to check the code for security problems.
(And don't forget that there are many people who do software security research. Open Source software benifits nicely when every security researcher has direct access to the source code).
Certainly diversity is good. Open Source doesn't preclude software diversity.
Yaz.
/. rule: when posting info about a bug in OSS, be sure to mention Microsoft so that everyone turns their focus and forgets that OSS has bugs, too.
...except Mozilla.org isn't exactly marketting Firefox as being a "beta quality" product. Go to Mozilla.org and go through the motions to get to the Firefox download page. Do you see ANYTHING saying "Firefox is a beta product and may contain bugs", that only advanced users should use it, etc.? Nope.
The Mozilla.org people have been actively trying to get people to promote Firefox, such as the recent campaign to submits reviews of Firefox to download.com.
You can't say one minute that Firefox is production quality and ready to replace IE (which I do agree with wholeheartedly), then turn around hide behind the "beta" label the next minute whenever a bug is found.
"People that quote themselves in their signatures bother me" - athakur999
Uh yeah, if you were programming in C++ 10 years ago maybe. There's really is no excuse for buffer overruns in modern C++ code except inept programmers. For me, Java forces me to give up too much and I remain skeptical that Java's GC algorithm is smart enough to management memory efficiently when under the gun. Have they outfitted it with something better than the generational algorithms I've seen so far? That algorithm chokes when large amounts of memory end up paged out.
OSS permits investigation and transparency
Without design specifications and a complete, well written documentation, the only way people could check a program is by reading the whole code and understanding the whole thing. Do you know a lot of people who would waste hundred of hours to look for bugs (apart from the ones who are developing the program) ?
OSS permits investigation, but no one is doing it because most OSS project have very little documentation. The result is most OSS project are extremely buggy.
And even worst, since most people who "work" on OSS project do it as a hobby, they prefer to add new shiny things rather than fixing bugs. Take the address book in mozilla/Thunderbird for example. I regularly lose contacts. Also, I once deleted a contact, and it gave the address of the deleted contact to the preceding contact - which means I was sending mail TO THE WRONG PERSON. Last week I tried to copy 34 address from one address book to another, it said 34 address copied, but then there was only 33 address. Found the missing address, tried to copy it (drag and drop), but no, I had to enter it manually. It's a real joke but no one is fixing it.
So who's shouting "Shut up! I can't hear you! la la la la" ?
What I don't understand is why an internet browser or mail reader can't have an automatic version checker. If there's an update or patch, it notifies the user (unless user has specified otherwise - whether it be to just install the thing or leave it be), who can then select to download and install the update. Mozilla has so many other nifty features that they shouldn't be above a feature which is found in many other programs - be it eMule, GetRight or Trillian. It certainly solves the patching problem.
who don't check buffers?
/. nerdboys will come out from under their rocks and proclaim, "Programming is hard! We can't check for our mistakes!"
How many years has it been now that buffer overflows are recognized as a major security problem?
How many years will it be before someone writes fucking code to go through a program and check for unchecked buffers?
How many years will it be before people are not allowed to put code in a system unless it is checked for unchecked buffers?
I mean, gimme a break here.
Now I suppose all the
Bullshit. You KNOW when you're using a buffer. You KNOW you're supposed to check it. So fucking CHECK IT!
Here's the bottom line: These coders are incompetent buffoons. Period.
Morons.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
No one has done this yet. Someone will, and they'll be famous.
Famous for writing the world's slowest virtual machine, yes.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Somebody mod that guy up as Funny!!!
Or, if you're not trying to be funny, you've clearly never worked in QA, or... maybe you've just explained that there are few GOOD pieces of commercial software...
Anyway, let me assure you that I worked a lot of QA gigs, and in every single one of them, the QA team was dwarfed by the dev team, rarely had good specs to plan from, and found their test time was viewed the most expendable part of the product cycle ( it's the first one to shrink in case of a slip elsewhere ). And those automated tests? Those paths you automate aren't likely to have *glaring* problems- at lest not ones the automated tools can catch - it's just the cases QA didn't have time to code up that'll fail... and of course, you can't automate something until the program is available, can you ? In practice, automated tools are only *really* useful for regression testing.
The most important thing I learned working QA is that the best QA in the world won't save you from a poorly planned or managed project, poor design, coders who don't unit test, or marketing guys who promise the sky and give a fixed do-or-die ship date to go with that sky. Code review is usually better than QA at finding non-design-related bugs. If the coders are good, QA ends up finding usability issues, rather than functionality issues, which is your best-case scenario, even though it means your prototyping and design phase was lacking.
Difference is, you pay for Windows, and in doing so certain expectations are placed upon it, Mozilla et al are given away free with no guarantees. You deserve what you pay for.
[sarcasm]
Oh yeah, cos I spent so much on that copy of mozilla, and I expect warranty support having coughed up all my hard earned money. If I don't get satisfaction, I'll sue!
I mean, it's not like microsoft force you to buy a copy of their OS every time you buy a new computer, and it's so easy to uninstall internet explorer from their OS so you don't have to be vulnerable if you don't want to use that particular piece of embedded software.
[/sarcasm]
Seriously. Microsoft charge a monopoly rent for their software, and stops you removing buggy components. Mozilla offers a free piece of addon software. I think it's a little unfair to hold them to the same standard of financial responsibility...
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
For the tech illiterate users, MS products might be safer. Most people won't read Slashdot to find out about the latest vulnerabilities in Mozilla/Firefox, and might not hear about this. MS's autoupdate ensures that people will get patches for IE and other MS products.
In a perfect world, there shouldn't be any wars. Rapists should be able to get off on porn and hungry people should just grow their own food. It's really a quite simple concept. Who cares? People shouldn't be giving advice on what should happen. We have to plan for the worst. Because the worst is just as possible. Noone should be promising that something isn't possible when it is.
The idea that a user based compromise is worse because your data is more important and an o/s which can be re-installed is a valid one.
However.. The problem with the exploit having more universal access is not necessarily that your data is wacked, but that your nice compromised o/s is now a zombie machine spreading spam and worms across the internet so your granny gets busted by the feds.
The damage to your data is pretty bad for you... the damage of all your data, and everyone in your address book's data, plus everyone in their address book's data.... that's bad for everyone.
Not to mention the fact (oh, I am mentioning it now) that in a true multi-user environment, you'd be really pissed if your data was iced because of someone else's poor security, like opening unsolicited attachments. I wouldn't care if someone else's data got wrecked, but I'd care if they knacked mine.. selfish of a sort, but that's the good of the many..