Cisco’s Talos threat intelligence and research group this week disclosed the details of recently patched vulnerabilities affecting the Chrome and Firefox web browsers.
The Chrome flaw, tracked as CVE-2020-6463 and classified as high severity with a CVSS score of 8.8, was patched by Google in April with the release of Chrome 81.0.4044.122. The tech giant awarded a $5,000 bounty for the bug.
The vulnerability, described as a memory corruption issue, impacts PDFium, the open source PDF renderer used by Chrome and other applications. An attacker could exploit the weakness for remote code execution in the browser by getting the targeted user to open a specially crafted document that contains JavaScript code.
“PDFium supports execution of Javascript scripts embedded inside PDF documents. As Chrome itself, PDFium uses V8 as its Javascript engine. This vulnerability lies in a way V8 in a specific configuration processes regular expressions,” Talos explained.
Talos has released a report containing a detailed technical description of the vulnerability and its root cause.
Google released a patch for CVE-2020-6463 roughly two weeks after it learned of its existence. The Chrome version that fixes this flaw also addresses several other serious issues, including ones for which the tech giant awarded $15,000 and $20,000 bounties.
As for the Firefox vulnerability, Talos disclosed the details of CVE-2020-12418, a high-severity issue related to the URL mPath functionality, which can be exploited to obtain information that could allow the attacker to bypass ASLR and execute arbitrary code. Exploitation involves getting the targeted user to access a web page containing a specially crafted URL object.
This is one of the several high-severity vulnerabilities patched by Mozilla this week with the release of Firefox 78. Talos reported its findings to Mozilla in late May.
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