Mozilla Releases Firefox 17 With 2,300 Bug Fixes

Mozilla has released the latest version of its Firefox Web browser, which addresses a massive batch of 2,365 bugs. In addition to general usability issues, the latest release addresses 16 security issues.

Six critical issues were patched in version 17, including two buffer overflow issues, memory safety hazards, CSS crashes, GIF rendering issues, and a CSS & HTML Injection issue.

Mozilla said that if a malicious stylesheet is inspected via the browser’s Style Inspector, then HTML and CSS can run in a chrome privileged context without being sanitized, leading to arbitrary code execution. In another CSS related fix, Mozilla corrected a problem with combining SVG text on a path with the setting of CSS properties could lead to an exploitable crash.

The two buffer overflow issues were introduced during development, but patched before general release. “These issues are potentially exploitable, allowing for remote code execution,” Mozilla’s advisory states.

Likewise, the vulnerability in GIF rendering was also introduced in development, but fixed before general release. It too is primarily a buffer overflow issue, but was ranked critical due to the fact that code execution was possible, and because GOF images are so widely used.

The memory related problems extended beyond Firefox.

“Mozilla developers identified and fixed several memory safety bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption under certain circumstances, and we presume that with enough effort at least some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code,” Mozilla explained.

In addition to the security fixes and bug corrections, Firefox 17 delivers on a promise made by Mozilla in February to drop support for Mac OS X 10.5. Accordingly, Firefox for Mac will only be available for Mac OS X 10.6 or better moving forward.

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