By Colin Barker, 13 December 2005 09:10
NEWS
The Mozilla Foundation has issued a security advisory, acknowledging concerns about a potential flaw in its Firefox 1.5 browser that could cause a buffer overflow error.
However, the browser company strenuously denied in its Sunday advisory that the problem would cause any lasting damage to the application. It maintains that the glitch is very easy to fix.
The issue came to light last Wednesday, when the first exploit code for the potential vulnerability was published.
The problem occurs with extremely long history.dat files. If the history file gets larger than 10.5MB, then the system can appear to freeze. Mozilla said the system is not actually frozen but it takes time to clear the history buffer. The company said that to cure the problem, users need to clear the History archive.
Mozilla said in a statement it has "issued a security advisory on a temporary start-up unresponsiveness caused by web pages in a browser history with extremely long titles. If a user encounters this problem, the slow start can be fixed by clearing the browser history."
The problem has been given a non-critical rating by Mozilla.
Colin Barker writes for ZD Net UK
Comments
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1. Simon
Shock horror - security vulnerability not actually a security vulnerability !
Wow, talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel - a whole article about a flaw that can cause, horror or horrors, minor inconvenience to users. No security risk, just inconvenience that is easily fixed.
I doubt if such a flaw would even merit a mention in a certain other vendors products - heck I'm used to 'delays on startup' as normal operation !