Classic tech archive.
From the original averyjparker.com tech blog — historical context; pair with modern guides where noted.
Full archive · Maker projects ·
Network Ninja
Classic tip · Classic
Firefox 1.5 vulnerability
Incidents.org has reported on the first announced vulnerability with Mozilla Firefox 1.5 since it's release. The vulnerability is along these lines. History of visited sites is kept in a file called …
Incidents.org has reported on the first announced vulnerability with Mozilla Firefox 1.5 since it's release. The vulnerability is along these lines. History of visited sites is kept in a file called history.dat IF a URL for a visited site is long enough it will cause a buffer overflow and denial of service. (After visiting such a url, the browser will crash on each attempted start. (until history.dat is deleted.))
There is proof of concept code, there is also speculation that it could be made to do worse (malicious code execution.) No fix is available yet. I'll be eager to see how quickly firefox responds.
There is a possible workaround...
POSSIBLE WORKAROUND However, the following is a workaround that should work (if it doesn't let me know). Go to Tools -> Options. Select the Privacy Icon, and then the History tab. Set the number of days to save pages at 0. This will disable writing anything to history.dat as far as I can tell, and should nullify the exploit.