Thursday, October 28, 2010
Firefox 3.6.12 released to patch a vulnerability being exploited in the wild
The Nobel Peace Prize web site and others have been infected with malware that in turn infects computers via Firefox if the user is not running the just released update of Firefox - version 3.6.12 (or the 3.5 equivalent).
The vulnerability was in the JavaScript interpreter. It was of a category named use-after-free. Memory was dynamically allocated, then freed - and then use continued after that. It is not terribly uncommon in large, complex programs written in C and C++. This type of bug cannot be written directly in Java because Java uses garbage collection instead of letting application programmers do alloc/free themselves.
Users running NoScript addon for Firefox were safe all along, unless they expressly gave permission to an infected web site to run JavaScript.
The vulnerability was in the JavaScript interpreter. It was of a category named use-after-free. Memory was dynamically allocated, then freed - and then use continued after that. It is not terribly uncommon in large, complex programs written in C and C++. This type of bug cannot be written directly in Java because Java uses garbage collection instead of letting application programmers do alloc/free themselves.
Users running NoScript addon for Firefox were safe all along, unless they expressly gave permission to an infected web site to run JavaScript.
Labels: firefox, javascript, malware, mswin, security, security snafus, web
Hopefully, someday I will get this page to validate!
