Mozilla developers reported memory safety bugs present in Firefox 85. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code. This vulnerability affects Firefox < 86.

The Linux/Unix host has one or more packages installed that are impacted by a vulnerability without a vendor supplied patch available.

  - Mozilla developers reported memory safety bugs present in Firefox 85. Some of these bugs showed evidence     of memory corruption and we presume that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run     arbitrary code. This vulnerability affects Firefox < 86. (CVE-2021-23979)

Note that Nessus relies on the presence of the package as reported by the vendor.

The remote Ubuntu 16.04 LTS / 18.04 LTS / 20.04 LTS host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the USN-4756-1 advisory.

    Multiple security issues were discovered in Firefox. If a user were tricked into opening a specially     crafted website, an attacker could potentially exploit these to cause a denial of service, obtain     sensitive information, conduct cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, bypass HTTP auth phishing warnings, or     execute arbitrary code.

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Ubuntu security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

The version of Firefox installed on the remote Windows host is prior to 86.0. It is, therefore, affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the mfsa2021-07 advisory.

  - As specified in the W3C Content Security Policy draft, when creating a violation report, User agents need     to ensure that the source file is the URL requested by the page, pre-redirects. If thats not possible,     user agents need to strip the URL down to an origin to avoid unintentional leakage. Under certain types     of redirects, Firefox incorrectly set the source file to be the destination of the redirects. This was     fixed to be the redirect destination's origin. (CVE-2021-23969)

  - Context-specific code was included in a shared jump table; resulting in assertions being triggered in     multithreaded wasm code. (CVE-2021-23970)

  - If Content Security Policy blocked frame navigation, the full destination of a redirect served in the     frame was reported in the violation report; as opposed to the original frame URI. This could be used to     leak sensitive information contained in such URIs. (CVE-2021-23968)

  - The DOMParser API did not properly process <noscript> elements for escaping. This could     be used as an mXSS vector to bypass an HTML Sanitizer. (CVE-2021-23974)

  - When processing a redirect with a conflicting Referrer-Policy, Firefox would have adopted the redirect's     Referrer-Policy. This would have potentially resulted in more information than intended by the original     origin being provided to the destination of the redirect. (CVE-2021-23971)

  - When accepting a malicious intent from other installed apps, Firefox for Android accepted manifests from     arbitrary file paths and allowed declaring webapp manifests for other origins. This could be used to gain     fullscreen access for UI spoofing and could also lead to cross-origin attacks on targeted     websites.Note: This issue is a different issue from CVE-2020-26954 and only affected Firefox for     Android. Other operating systems are unaffected. (CVE-2021-23976)

  - Firefox for Android suffered from a time-of-check-time-of-use vulnerability that allowed a malicious     application to read sensitive data from application directories.Note: This issue is only affected     Firefox for Android. Other operating systems are unaffected. (CVE-2021-23977)

  - One phishing tactic on the web is to provide a link with HTTP Auth. For example     https://www.phishingtarget.com@evil.com. To mitigate this type of attack, Firefox will     display a warning dialog; however, this warning dialog would not have been displayed if evil.com used a     redirect that was cached by the browser. (CVE-2021-23972)

  - The developer page about:memory has a Measure function for exploring what object types the browser has     allocated and their sizes. When this function was invoked; we incorrectly called the sizeof function,     instead of using the API method that checks for invalid pointers. (CVE-2021-23975)

  - When trying to load a cross-origin resource in an audio/video context a decoding error may have resulted,     and the content of that error may have revealed information about the resource. (CVE-2021-23973)

  - Mozilla developers Alexis Beingessner, Tyson Smith, Nika Layzell, and Mats Palmgren reported memory safety     bugs present in Firefox 85 and Firefox ESR 78.7. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption     and we presume that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code.
    (CVE-2021-23978)

  - Mozilla developers Tyson Smith, Lars T Hansen, Valentin Gosu, and Sebastian Hengst reported memory safety     bugs present in Firefox 85. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that     with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code. (CVE-2021-23979)

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

The version of Firefox installed on the remote macOS or Mac OS X host is prior to 86.0. It is, therefore, affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the mfsa2021-07 advisory.

  - As specified in the W3C Content Security Policy draft, when creating a violation report, User agents need     to ensure that the source file is the URL requested by the page, pre-redirects. If thats not possible,     user agents need to strip the URL down to an origin to avoid unintentional leakage. Under certain types     of redirects, Firefox incorrectly set the source file to be the destination of the redirects. This was     fixed to be the redirect destination's origin. (CVE-2021-23969)

  - Context-specific code was included in a shared jump table; resulting in assertions being triggered in     multithreaded wasm code. (CVE-2021-23970)

  - If Content Security Policy blocked frame navigation, the full destination of a redirect served in the     frame was reported in the violation report; as opposed to the original frame URI. This could be used to     leak sensitive information contained in such URIs. (CVE-2021-23968)

  - The DOMParser API did not properly process <noscript> elements for escaping. This could     be used as an mXSS vector to bypass an HTML Sanitizer. (CVE-2021-23974)

  - When processing a redirect with a conflicting Referrer-Policy, Firefox would have adopted the redirect's     Referrer-Policy. This would have potentially resulted in more information than intended by the original     origin being provided to the destination of the redirect. (CVE-2021-23971)

  - When accepting a malicious intent from other installed apps, Firefox for Android accepted manifests from     arbitrary file paths and allowed declaring webapp manifests for other origins. This could be used to gain     fullscreen access for UI spoofing and could also lead to cross-origin attacks on targeted     websites.Note: This issue is a different issue from CVE-2020-26954 and only affected Firefox for     Android. Other operating systems are unaffected. (CVE-2021-23976)

  - Firefox for Android suffered from a time-of-check-time-of-use vulnerability that allowed a malicious     application to read sensitive data from application directories.Note: This issue is only affected     Firefox for Android. Other operating systems are unaffected. (CVE-2021-23977)

  - One phishing tactic on the web is to provide a link with HTTP Auth. For example     https://www.phishingtarget.com@evil.com. To mitigate this type of attack, Firefox will     display a warning dialog; however, this warning dialog would not have been displayed if evil.com used a     redirect that was cached by the browser. (CVE-2021-23972)

  - The developer page about:memory has a Measure function for exploring what object types the browser has     allocated and their sizes. When this function was invoked; we incorrectly called the sizeof function,     instead of using the API method that checks for invalid pointers. (CVE-2021-23975)

  - When trying to load a cross-origin resource in an audio/video context a decoding error may have resulted,     and the content of that error may have revealed information about the resource. (CVE-2021-23973)

  - Mozilla developers Alexis Beingessner, Tyson Smith, Nika Layzell, and Mats Palmgren reported memory safety     bugs present in Firefox 85 and Firefox ESR 78.7. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption     and we presume that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code.
    (CVE-2021-23978)

  - Mozilla developers Tyson Smith, Lars T Hansen, Valentin Gosu, and Sebastian Hengst reported memory safety     bugs present in Firefox 85. Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that     with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code. (CVE-2021-23979)

Note that Nessus has not tested for this issue but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

ID	Name	Product	Family	Severity
250184	Linux Distros Unpatched Vulnerability : CVE-2021-23979	Nessus	Misc.	high
147994	Ubuntu 16.04 LTS / 18.04 LTS / 20.04 LTS : Firefox vulnerabilities (USN-4756-1)	Nessus	Ubuntu Local Security Checks	high
146780	Mozilla Firefox < 86.0	Nessus	Windows	high
146779	Mozilla Firefox < 86.0	Nessus	MacOS X Local Security Checks	high

Detections

Analytics

CVE-2021-23979

high

Tenable Plugins

high

high

high

high