Quantum Secular Labs / Blog / Advisories

CVE-2009-2463: Mozilla Firefox: Buffer overflow

CVE-2009-2463 has a CVSS v2 base score of 10.0 (the maximum on that scale) and affects Mozilla Firefox. Per its scoring, it can be exploited over the network, without authentication. The scored impact on confidentiality, integrity and availability is the highest available.

Vulnerability description

Multiple integer overflows in the (1) PL_Base64Decode and (2) PL_Base64Encode functions in nsprpub/lib/libc/src/base64.c in Mozilla Firefox before 3.0.12, Thunderbird before 2.0.0.24, and SeaMonkey before 1.1.19 allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (memory corruption and application crash) or possibly execute arbitrary code via unspecified vectors that trigger buffer overflows.

Severity breakdown

CVSS v2.0 10.0: AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:C/I:C/A:C

  • Access vector: Network. Exploitable remotely over the network.
  • Access complexity: Low. No special conditions are required.
  • Authentication: None. No authentication is needed.
  • Confidentiality impact: Complete. Total information disclosure.
  • Integrity impact: Complete. Total loss of integrity.
  • Availability impact: Complete. Total shutdown of the component.

Affected products

  • Mozilla Firefox: 0.1; 0.2; 0.3; 0.4; 0.5; 0.6; 0.6.1; 0.7; 0.7.1; 0.8; 0.9; 0.9 rc
  • Mozilla Thunderbird: 2.0.0.0; 2.0.0.1; 2.0.0.2; 2.0.0.3; 2.0.0.4; 2.0.0.5; 2.0.0.6; 2.0.0.7; 2.0.0.8; 2.0.0.9; 2.0.0.11; 2.0.0.12

References