Mozilla patches Firefox's dirty dozen

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 22 Apr 2009 at 09:49

Mozilla has patched 12 bugs in Firefox, just days before the scheduled rollout of the fourth beta for Firefox 3.5.

The dozen fixes represent the biggest single patch issued by Mozilla since December, when it had to deal with 13 bugs in the browser.

This latest slew of fixes included in Firefox 3.0.9 bring four rated critical, two rated high, two moderate and four low, as defined by Mozilla's four-step ranking system.

The four critical vulnerabilities are split between Firefox's Gecko browser engine and the JavaScript engine, which have been patched to prevent possible exploits in the future.

"Some of these crashes 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 says in its advisory notes.

The remaining patches prevent users being redirected to malicious websites by plugins, and block a potential cross-site forgery attack through Adobe Flash.

Mozilla is slated to unveil the fourth beta of the much-delayed Firefox 3.5 by the end of the week, which should bring significant improvements to Javascript rendering speeds.