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    Another Day, Another Firefox Security Fix

    By
    Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
    -
    November 27, 2007
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      Once upon a time, Firefox was known for being far less prone to security bugs than Internet Explorer. Things have changed.

      On Nov. 27, Mozilla released the newest, security-patched version of the popular Web browser, Firefox 2.0.0.10.

      The vast majority of Firefox users will have the latest and greatest automatically installed on their systems. This latest update includes fixes for three security bugs.

      Perhaps the most important of these fixes is one that prevents an XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) attack. This particular XSS fix prevents the “jar: URI” hazard, which is a mechanism that had been designed to support digitally signed Web pages.

      This in turn enabled Web administrators to set up sites that could load pages that had been packaged in .zip archives containing signatures in Java archive format. The problem was that Firefox couldnt identify the true source of the jar: content.

      /zimages/5/28571.gifClick here to read about the beta of Firefox 3.

      Heres how it might work in practice. Many Web 2.0 applications allow the upload of jar/.zip files. For example, Web mail clients, collaboration systems and document sharing systems all allow such uploads. You see such popular document formats as OpenWriters .odt (OpenDocument Text) and Microsoft Office 2007 Open XML use the .zip format to space.

      Youre probably beginning to see where this goes. All an attacker need do is create a document in one of those formats, change its extension to .zip and, ta-da, instant Trojan horse.

      /zimages/5/28571.gifRead the full story on DesktopLinux.com: Another Day, Another Firefox Security Fix

      Check out eWEEK.coms Security Center for the latest security news, reviews and analysis. And for insights on security coverage around the Web, take a look at eWEEKs Security Watch blog.

      Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
      I'm editor-at-large for Ziff Davis Enterprise. That's a fancy title that means I write about whatever topic strikes my fancy or needs written about across the Ziff Davis Enterprise family of publications. You'll find most of my stories in Linux-Watch, DesktopLinux and eWEEK. Prior to becoming a technology journalist, I worked at NASA and the Department of Defense on numerous major technological projects.

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