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Dozens Of Vulnerabilities In Firefox?



SecurityProNews
Staff Writer
2006-09-08

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Security software company Klocwork's Adam Harrison claims to have uncovered 655 defects and 71 potential security vulnerabilities in Mozilla's Firefox web browser. A Mozilla developer fired back, calling the analysis bogus.

Harrison used his company's K7 static analysis tool to delve into the open source browser's code. Though he praises the overall quality of the software, Harrison says someone with "in-depth knowledge and background" with the Firefox code would have to assess the risk.

The Firefox team was given the analysis results, he says, and would not elaborate on the security vulnerabilities. He did however list the known defects, which range from NULL pointer deference distribution to memory management and uninitialized variable distribution.

Former Firefox developer Alec Flett, who helped architect some of the Mozilla codebase, isn't buying Harrison's assessment. From Flett's comment:

This is really bogus - many people have run code correctness tools on the mozilla/firefox codebase over the last few years and some good has indeed come out of it. There are always a few dangling pointers or missing null checks that could be added here and there. But to claim that there are 611 known, specific, real defects is just wrong.

With most of these tools the signal:noise ratio is very high. For example, most of these "dereferencing null" cases are either handled automatically by C++ template wrappers that do smart pointer management. Many of these "potential" memory leaks are handled automatically by XPCOM's refcounting.

This is not to say there aren't 141 other legitimate memory management defects lurking, but it takes a deeper (human) understanding of the codebase, as well as testing of actual codepaths in use, to flush them out.



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