Privilege escalation in Thunderbird Updater

Affected versions

NVD version ranges (for catalog products). Add the product to your stack with a version and matching uses these.

• mozilla firefoxbefore 115.23.0
• mozilla firefoxbefore 138.0
• mozilla firefox116.0 and later · before 128.10.0
• mozilla thunderbirdbefore 128.10.0
• mozilla thunderbird129.0 and later · before 138.0

Versions reported by the vendor

Affected version ranges reported by the assigning authority (mozilla). Independent of NVD's CPE analysis and usually ahead of it.

• Mozilla Firefox

  • 115.23 and later · up to and including 115.*not affected · rpm
  • 128.10 and later · up to and including 128.*not affected · rpm
  • 138 and laternot affected · rpm

• Mozilla Thunderbird

  • 128.10 and later · up to and including 128.*not affected · rpm
  • 138 and laternot affected · rpm

Package-level exposure

OSV and GitHub Advisory data: ecosystem, package and range. SBOM matching uses this table.

Other highest-scoring records for the same primary product.

• CVE-2010-3765Mozilla Firefox 3.5.x through 3.5.14 and 3.6.x through 3.6.11, Thunderbird 3.1.6 before 3.1.6 and 3.0.x before 3.0.10, and SeaMonkey 2.x befKEV
  94Now
• CVE-2019-11708Insufficient vetting of parameters passed with the Prompt:Open IPC message between child and parent processes can result in the non-sandboxeKEV
  87Now
• CVE-2015-4495The PDF reader in Mozilla Firefox before 39.0.3, Firefox ESR 38.x before 38.1.1, and Firefox OS before 2.2 allows remote attackers to bypassKEV
  86Now
• CVE-2013-1690Mozilla Firefox before 22.0, Firefox ESR 17.x before 17.0.7, Thunderbird before 17.0.7, and Thunderbird ESR 17.x before 17.0.7 do not properKEV
  86Now
• CVE-2019-17026Incorrect alias information in IonMonkey JIT compiler for setting array elements could lead to a type confusion.KEV
  79This week
• CVE-2024-9680An attacker was able to achieve code execution in the content process by exploiting a use-after-free in Animation timelines.KEV
  76This week

FIRST EPSS daily score; only changes of 0.01 or more are recorded (step chart).

Root cause

A user-supplied file name is joined with the allowed directory, but the result is never checked to confirm it is still inside that directory.

A representative example of this vulnerability class. Not the vendor's source code; it shows the faulty pattern and its fix.

1const file = path.join(ROOT, req.query.name);2res.sendFile(file);

1const file = path.resolve(ROOT, req.query.name);2if (!file.startsWith(ROOT + path.sep)) {3  return res.sendStatus(400);4}5res.sendFile(file);

Attack context

MITRE CAPEC attack patterns and ATT&CK techniques for this weakness class (CWE). A starting point for detection rules and threat hunting.