August 15th, 2007
Opera uses Mozilla fuzzer to find, fix severe browser flaw
How’s this for cross-browser cooperation?
Using a JavaScript fuzzer released by Mozilla at Black Hat, Opera’s security team has found and fixed a “highly severe” browser flaw that could be used in code execution attacks.
The problem:
A virtual function call on an invalid pointer that may reference data crafted by the attacker can be used to execute arbitrary code.
The flaw was found with jsfunfuzz, a JavaScript compiler/decompiler fuzzer built by Jesse Ruderman and released earlier this month by Mozilla security chief Window Snyder.
It is the first in a series of security tools that will be released by the open-source group.
Snyder said all the major browser vendors — Opera and Microsoft — were giving the fuzzer ahead of time and they were all comfortable with the idea of making it available to the public.
Ryan Naraine is a journalist and security evangelist at Kaspersky Lab. He manages Threatpost.com, a security news portal. Here is Ryan's full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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