Slashdot Log In
Firefox 0.10.1 Released, Fixes Security Hole
Posted by
CowboyNeal
on Sat Oct 02, 2004 08:41 AM
from the hole-in-the-dam dept.
from the hole-in-the-dam dept.
_xeno_ writes "Firefox 0.10.1 was released today to fix a security flaw that could potentially allow a malicious site to erase files from the user's Download directory. If you already have Firefox 0.10 installed, you can go to Tools, Options, and choose Advanced, go to Software Updates and choose Check Now to grab the patch."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
done already! (Score:5, Informative)
this is what i call being secured
Re:done already! (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:done already! (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:done already! (Score:5, Insightful)
its very different to have an exploit in the wild and be able to prevent it in 3 seconds, or waiting 1,2..10 weeks for a fix
Parent
Re:done already! (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:done already! (Score:4, Informative)
Firefox can scan a lot faster than Windows Update because it is only checking for updates to a single program.
Of course, Microsoft could make an option within IE to scan for IE-only updates, which would make updating IE much faster, but they don't.
Parent
Re:done already! (Score:4, Funny)
Of course, Microsoft could make an option within IE to scan for IE-only updates, which would make updating IE much faster, but they don't.
What is the point? Since IE is integrated into the operating system, updates require reboots even under Windows XP which is a lot better with regards to rebooting than previous versions. Anyway, even if the actual update is faster, you would still have to wait for the reboot.
I just updated Firefox in less than ten seconds, and I did not have to restart the browser, certainly not the entire operating system (Windows XP in this case).
Parent
Re:done already! (Score:5, Informative)
I ran into this same problem with the update under Linux. MS Windows users won't run into it since they are running as local Admin or have write permissions to the firefox directory. When I ran it as root, it worked fine so I take it the update needs to write to the root firefox directory it probably then updates your firefox profile. As a normal user you cannot run the update and it never writes to your profile. I think it was just a poor update design for this one update. Hopefully the firefox team will fix it or fix this issue for future updates.
You could grab the latest firefox tarball from here [mozilla.org] and just untar it into your current firefox installation folder and restart.
Parent
This may sound stupid... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This may sound stupid... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:This may sound stupid... (Score:3, Funny)
well, it would be quite frustrating if your download directory is your Desktop, homedirectory or any other place where you keep other files too.
not to mention all the pron you have to download again
Ricardo.
Depends on your download directory (Score:3, Insightful)
There are, however, a lot of users who pack all their stuff onto the desktop or into "My Documents" with no or little subfolders. For such use cases, the patch is indeed worth installing.
Re:This may sound stupid... (Score:5, Informative)
1. Suppose your download directory isn't dedicated to just downloads. Any files in that directory are vulnerable.
2. You don't need to uninstall and reinstall. As the article says, just go to tools: options: advanced: software updates and hit the Check Now button
Parent
Re:This may sound stupid... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:This may sound stupid... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:This may sound stupid... (Score:5, Insightful)
Any vulnerability that allows remote users to alter content is by definition critical. It doesn't matter if you think it's a big deal. There should be no unauthorized access to files, period.
Your non-critical files aren't 777, are they? Now why is that? Well, despite the fact that data is non-critical, recoverable or maybe even pure gargabe you still wouldn't want people to mess with it, would you?
Think about it: you probably have a lots of old stuff, bank statements and what not somewhere. That data is useless to me (value == 0). By your logic, I could just throw it all out since it doesn't matter to me. It may still be valueable to you though. And even if it weren't, you still probably wouldn't appreciate me going through your stuff and tossing whatever I don't deem important.
See, all attacks that allow any access control circumvention at all are critical. Just because it's not critical to you, doesn't mean every feels the same way.
That's why disclosing the vulnerability and making an update available ASAP was a very good move on part of the fine folks at Mozilla. I just wish there was a mechanism to do manual network-wide mass roll-outs of critical updates (ie. rolling out critical updates immediately without having to wait for Firefox's periodical checks).
Parent
Re:defending this post worth loosing karma (Score:5, Funny)
The Gecko God of Mozilla and Open Source is a jerk. A complete kneebiter. Thanks for your time. Now I'm off to see Gentoo. Later.
Parent
Am I the only one . . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Am I the only one . . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Version numbers seem odd? (Score:3, Interesting)
Ah nevermind (Score:3, Insightful)
Helpful bug (Score:5, Funny)
My download directory in Windows is my desktop. Have you seen my desktop? [man.ac.uk] It's a fairly old screenshot, too - it's only got worse since then. My iBook's equally bad, except everything's just randomly strewn around the place...
A bit of remote tidying-up would be greatly appreciated.
Re:Helpful bug (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
When... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:When... (Score:5, Informative)
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=259
Currently, it's not scheduled to be marked as public before 4th October. It's still marked as private so that people have an opportunity to upgrade before the details are made public.
Parent
Cool. Upgrade Path (Score:5, Insightful)
Now if only Gaim does this.
Will
Re:Cool. Upgrade Path (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
These hurt... (Score:4, Insightful)
Sure it isn't that bad, but nonetheless, it doesn't help the Firefox's image at all and looking at Secunia, Firefox has had more advisories than any other browser, (yes, that includes Internet Explorer and the Mozilla Suite) since May this year.
Re:These hurt... (Score:5, Informative)
What you're seeing are the results of this program.. people are finding bugs, submitting them, and the bugs are being fixed before blackhats can exploit them.
This is a very wise decision on the part of Mozilla considering how close they are to a v1.0 release.
Parent
Re:Nope (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:These hurt... (Score:5, Informative)
And how many are there in IE that we haven't found yet? The dangerous exploits are the ones we don't know about.
And besides, do you expect Secunia to have all the security flaws from when IE was in beta? Or do you find it strange that a beta product has had more security flaws found in the last 6 months than the one that's been around and insecure for years.
Not to mention that none of the advisories were ranked "extremely critical", and only 2 were critical.
Not to bad for a beta product. Also (from Secunia):
Currently, 19 out of 60 Secunia advisories, is marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
Currently, 2 out of 13 Secunia advisories, is marked as "Unpatched" in the Secunia database.
Which would you trust?
Parent
On Linux the advanced items are ... (Score:5, Informative)
Probable bug . . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Seeing the error mesage and remembering this fact I lit Firefox as root and ran the update. This left Firefox mangled and incapiable of downloading things from the user accounts.
The moral of the story: do be careful using the update thingy. Now, off to fill out a bug report.
Re:Probable bug . . . . (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Linux users, take note (Score:5, Informative)
If this doesn't work, of course, you'll have to download and install, which is almost as painless as the upgrade frob. The red 'upgrade' icon may still be present, so you'll have to click that so that Firefox will find that all is well with the world.
As always, YMMV.
Re:Linux users, take note (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Upgrade was even easier then described... (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't upgrade (Score:5, Funny)
I would consider this a feature more than a bug. It's like someone breaking into your house and taking out the garbage for you...
Explaining 0.10.1 (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason (for as far as I know) that Firefox uses this versioning scheme:
If 1.0PR would have a version-tag with 1.0 in it, it would be more complicated for (for example) extensions to differentiate 1.0PR and the real 1.0. And home-users would probably not even get to see these version-numbers. They would just notice there is a new update.
And about the bugs, I know I'm stating the obvious, and that it's been said before in this thread, but I'll try again:
First of all, because Firefox performs so well people tend to forget this is still beta-software! Second, these bugs are discovered partially because of the bughunting program with rewards. So these bugs could well have existed for months before being discovered. It's good news they have already been squashed! And third, some of these bugs actually appeared because of the way Windows fucks up! (Remember the shell:// protocol?)
Hope this helps,
XoloX
Automatic stuff == bad security (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not just design a browser that works on multiple platforms, using an established cross-platform GUI such as wxWidgets, rather than going away to create a browser and coming back with another new, slow, bloated, universal uber-platform swiss-army-knife UI language... yeah, I know, "Do it yourself dude", and plenty of geeks out there just love the customizability of XUL, but truthfully all I want is a fast, small browser. It just seems like everything is getting larger, slower and more bloated these days. Even Firefox, which is supposed to be sleek and fast, runs like a dog on my workstation. I don't see why I should have to upgrade my computer just for a fricking browser, when every other piece of software that I use runs just fine thanks very much.
I don't hate Mozilla, these are just my honest reactions to the whole affair over the last couple of years.
Re:Automatic stuff == bad security (Score:5, Interesting)
To provide full support for the W3C standards, you need widgets that provide very specific capabilities. Toolkits like wxWidgets have the opposite goal: they work by hiding specifics from the application programmer. There is a fundamental mismatch between the two.
If you want to fully support all the standards that make up the web across different operating systems, you end up with something like Firefox. It's not primarily some geek pride thing (although that always plays a role); it is primarily a consequence of the complexity and scope of the standards involved.
Parent
Too Complicated? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Too Complicated? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Though a much more serious bug remains unfixed... (Score:5, Funny)
Just because most of us don't live in South America doesn't mean it isn't huge problem.
Another flawless Install, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WTF?? (Score:5, Informative)
Firefox 1.0 has *not* been released yet.
The current (Firefox 0.10.x) is a preview of what will become 1.0 when it is released (thus PR).
Parent
Re:Don't have that menu option (Score:4, Informative)
i guess thats because of the gnome integration..
Parent
Re:it's nice to see ms finally losing the browserw (Score:5, Interesting)
Note that the Opera browser shown in Rank 3 should not be taken as accurate as this merely runs a "ticker" on auto-refresh setting every 10 minutes.
# Hits User Agent
1 31005 15.75% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)
2 20925 10.63% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1;
3 11074 5.63% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0) Opera 7.50
4 10596 5.38% Opera/7.50 (Windows NT 5.0; U) [en]
5 9893 5.03% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko
6 8281 4.21% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)
7 7856 3.99% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProd
8 6113 3.11% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)
9 5286 2.69% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98)
10 4868 2.47% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1;
11 4795 2.44% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko
12 2915 1.48% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.2) Opera 7.50
13 2885 1.47% Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko
14 2783 1.41% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows 98; Win 9x 4.90)
15 2645 1.34% Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) Opera 7.54
Parent
Re:it's nice to see ms finally losing the browserw (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:luckily for me... (Score:4, Informative)
Um, no. That is absolutely not the case. The information bar and the trusted sites list is simply a user convenience/inforamtion mechanism like the pop-up blocking bar. After adding a site to the whitelist, a user still has to agree to the software installation. A site cannot "insert arbitrary code into your Mozilla install without your knowledge" because the install doesn't happen until you agree to the install. There are no prompt-less installs.
--Asa
Parent