Software Engineering Institute

Mozilla Firefox version 3.5 contains a vulnerability in the TraceMonkey components of Firefox's JavaScript engine.

Per Mozilla Bug Bug 503286:
"This is a JS engine bug dealing with deep bailing not properly restoring the return value from the result of the (fast native) escape function. We then try to do something with the uninitialized memory and crash in the interpreter."

Note that proof of concept code that demonstrates issue this is publicly available.

A remote, unauthenticated attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code or cause Firefox to crash.

Firefox 3.5.1 has been released to address this issue. See Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory 2009-41 for more information. Until updates can be applied, the below workarounds may mitigate this issue.

Disable TraceMonkey

To disable the vulnerable components, use the about:config interface to set javascript.options.jit.content and javascript.options.jit.chrome to false. This will still allow JavaScript to run, but it will disable the TraceMonkey performance enhancements.

Use NoScript

Using the Mozilla Firefox NoScript extension to whitelist web sites that can run scripts will help to mitigate this vulnerability. Further details for configuring NoScript are available in the Securing Your Web Browser document.

Disable JavaScript

For instructions on how to disable JavaScript in Firefox, please refer to the Firefox section of the Securing Your Web Browser document.