Mozilla releases Firefox 3.6.11 to address 12 flaws

Firefox 3.6.11 fixes eight “critical” flaws that could result in a remote attacker installing malicious software on victim machines.

Of the remaining flaws, two were rated “high” in severity, one “moderate” and another “low.”

In all, the vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code, obtain sensitive information, or cause a denial-of-service condition, according to an advisory posted Wednesday by the US-CERT.

One of the nine bulletins released by Mozilla as part of its security update involved critical library loading vulnerabilities, which could be exploited to execute arbitrary code by tricking a user into running the application or launch script in a directory containing a malicious library, according to an advisory from Danish vulnerability tracking firm Secunia. Another bulletin addressed several critical memory safety bugs in the browser engine used in Firefox and other Mozilla-based products. Some of the bugs could be exploited to run arbitrary code.

The remaining critical bulletins address a “dangling pointer” flaw and a “use-after-free error," both of which could result in the execution of attacker-controlled memory, as well as a buffer overflow, memory corruption bug that could lead to arbitrary code execution.

Mozilla also released Firefox 3.5.14 to address the same vulnerabilities. Some of the flaws also affect Mozilla's SeaMonkey application suite and the Thunderbird email client. The flaws were fixed in Thunderbird 3.1.5 and 3.0.9 and SeaMonkey 2.0.9.

According to the release notes of the browser installment, 3.6.11 also includes several performance and stability improvements.