CVE-2005-2414
Description
Race condition in the xpcom library, as used by web browsers such as Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, and Galeon, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (application crash) via a large HTML file that loads a DOM call from within nested DIV tags, which causes part of the currently rendering page and referenced objects to be deleted.
Predictions
Heuristic predictions, AS-IS, for prioritization only.
Mitigations
No mitigations published for this CVE yet.
The vendor-content worker queues fetches as references arrive (check back in a few minutes). Or — if you've already worked around this in production — publish your fix to the community-verified tier.
✚ Propose a mitigation on Community → Mitigations published via the community go through AI scoring + 2 human reviewers + 7-day silent objection window before landing here withsource_tier=community-verified.
Exploits
Public proof-of-concept code below. AS-IS, for defenders and authorised testing only.
Exploit-DB
XPCOM - Race Condition
XPCOM Race Condition
Vendor: Mozilla
Product: XPCOM
Version:
Website: http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/
CVE: CVE-2005-2414
OSVDB: 18226
PACKETSTORM: 38837
Description:
xpcom, or cross platform component object model is a framework for writing cross-platform, modular software. The xpcom library is used in many applications including a majority of the popular browsers such as FireFox, NetScape, Mozilla, Galeon, etc. It seems that there is a race condition of sorts in xpcom that makes it possible for an attacker to crash a victims browser by having them view a malformed html document. This issue is not believed to be exploitable by the Mozilla dev team, and will likely be addressed in full at a later date by the development team.
XPCOM Race Condition:
It is possible for an attacker to create a race condition that will cause an access violation and result in a hard crash of the browser. One way to trigger this issue is by taking a decent sized html file and loading a dom call within some nested divs that will cause part of the page currently being rendered to be deleted. If the page has not loaded by the time the dom call is made then we can delete objects that have yet to be referenced, which will result in a crash as soon as the browser tries to reference the deleted object.
http://www.gulftech.org/wrecko.html
The above link is a simple proof of concept I wrote a few months ago to show the developers how the issue could be used to cause a crash of the affected web browser. Due to time constraints I have not got to look into this issue very in depth, but it may be possible to use the race condition described here in combination with other dom calls or javascript to produce different results than those demonstrated in my proof of concept.
Solution:
Mozilla have been aware of this issue for some months, and have fixed the issue on trunk, but not on branch. The reason for this as stated by one of the developers is "fixes for this stuff could easily cause regressions". I did test this issue on the latest copy of the mozilla browser (Deer Park) this morning though, and it seemed to NOT be vulnerable. However, firefox and the like are still affected.
Credits:
James Bercegay of the GulfTech Security Research TeamOS impact
Debian Fixed 1 release
| Version | Status | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
| sid | Fixed | 1.5.dfsg-1 |
References
Community-verified mitigations for this CVE will appear above when contributors publish them.
Verify integrity in audit chain (admin only). AS-IS.