Mozilla beats Microsoft to patch punch, quashes first critical bug in Firefox 3.5

From InfoWorld: Mozilla late Thursday issued the first patch for Firefox 3.5, fixing a flaw that went public Monday. One noted contributor had called the flaw a "self-inflicted" vulnerability.

Firefox 3.5.1 patches a critical flaw in the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine's Just-in-Time (JIT) compiler. "This could be exploited by an attacker to run arbitrary code such as installing malware," the accompanying security advisory warned.

Exploit code for the vulnerability was posted to the milw0rm.com malware site Monday, four days after Mozilla developers had discovered the bug and began working on a fix.

Andreas Gal, a project scientist at the University of California, Irvine -- and a key contributor to the TraceMonkey engine that Mozilla added to Firefox with Version 3.5 -- said that it appeared the hacker had created the attack code after spotting discussions and test cases on Bugzilla, Mozilla's bug- and change-tracking database. "Looking at the exploit code and our test cases, I think this is self-inflicted and we should have hidden the bug earlier," said Gal in one of several comments appended to the vulnerability's Bugzilla entry.

Although Mozilla had originally slated Firefox 3.5.1 for release later in the month, developers accelerated the schedule to plug the hole.

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