Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Application Security

Mozilla Publishes Results of VPN Security Audit

Mozilla announced on Tuesday that it has made public a report detailing the results of a security audit targeting its Mozilla VPN product.

Mozilla announced on Tuesday that it has made public a report detailing the results of a security audit targeting its Mozilla VPN product.

Officially launched in July 2020, Mozilla VPN is an open source virtual private network available as a browser extension, desktop application and mobile app. Mozilla VPN is currently available in 13 countries across North America, Europe and the APAC region.

Mozilla hired Germany-based security services provider Cure53 earlier this year to analyze the Mozilla VPN apps for Windows, Linux, macOS, iOS and Android, and this week it made the results of the audit public.

The analysis conducted by the company led to the discovery of one vulnerability and 15 “miscellaneous issues” that the researchers said did not lead to an exploit but could aid attackers in achieving their goals.

The vulnerability, classified as medium severity, could lead to user deanonymization if certain conditions are met — an attacker needs to be able to passively monitor network traffic, which typically only nation state threat actors can achieve. The flaw is related to a captive portal detection mechanism and Mozilla has determined that it would not patch it as the user benefits outweigh the security risk.

Of the miscellaneous issues, one has been classified as high severity and one as medium severity, with the remaining problems described as having low severity or being informational.

The high-severity issue is related to the VPN client exposing a WebSocket interface to the localhost when in debug mode. An attacker could have used this to obtain information from the targeted user by getting them to access a malicious website. However, customers were not affected as the impacted WebSocket interface was only used in pre-release test builds.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

The medium-severity problem was related to the authentication flow used by VPN clients, and it could potentially result in an authorization code leak, but Mozilla said exploitation was prevented by the Content Security Policy (CSP) that is in place.

Mozilla addressed a majority of the problems in July, and Cure53 confirmed in August that the issues no longer exist.

This was the second audit by Cure53. The first, conducted in August 2020, led to the discovery of a bug that was classified as critical.

Cure53 has audited several major projects over the past years, including cURL, Dovecot, the Network Time Protocol (NTP), TunnelBear, and Firefox Accounts.

Related: SecureDrop Workstation Gets Post-Audit Security Refresh

Related: Tech Audit of Colonial Pipeline Found ‘Glaring’ Problems

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a contributing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

SecurityWeek’s Threat Detection and Incident Response Summit brings together security practitioners from around the world to share war stories on breaches, APT attacks and threat intelligence.

Register

Securityweek’s CISO Forum will address issues and challenges that are top of mind for today’s security leaders and what the future looks like as chief defenders of the enterprise.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Application Security

Cycode, a startup that provides solutions for protecting software source code, emerged from stealth mode on Tuesday with $4.6 million in seed funding.

Application Security

PayPal is alerting roughly 35,000 individuals that their accounts have been targeted in a credential stuffing campaign.

Application Security

GitHub this week announced the revocation of three certificates used for the GitHub Desktop and Atom applications.

Application Security

Drupal released updates that resolve four vulnerabilities in Drupal core and three plugins.

Application Security

A CSRF vulnerability in the source control management (SCM) service Kudu could be exploited to achieve remote code execution in multiple Azure services.

Application Security

While there are many routes to application security, bundles that allow security teams to quickly and easily secure applications and affect security posture in...

Application Security

Fortinet on Monday issued an emergency patch to cover a severe vulnerability in its FortiOS SSL-VPN product, warning that hackers have already exploited the...

Application Security

Many developers and security people admit to having experienced a breach effected through compromised API credentials.