CVE-2013-1055 Potential DoS through abuse of rate limit in libunity-webapps for Firefox

What is CVE-2013-1055?

CVE-2013-1055 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Canonical Ubuntu Linux, published on 7 Apr 2021. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

The unity-firefox-extension package could be tricked into dropping a C callback which was still in use, which Firefox would then free, causing Firefox to crash. This could be achieved by adding an action to the launcher and updating it with new callbacks until the libunity-webapps rate limit was hit. Fixed in 3.0.0+14.04.20140416-0ubuntu1.14.04.1 of unity-firefox-extension and in all versions of libunity-webapps by shipping an empty unity-firefox-extension package, thus disabling the extension entirely and invalidating the attack against the libunity-webapps package.

Weakness: CWE-404

Which versions are affected by CVE-2013-1055?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Canonical Ubuntu Linux, Canonical Unity-Firefox-Extension.

How do I fix CVE-2013-1055?

Apply the vendor's patch.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2013-1055 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2013-1055 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Canonical Ubuntu Linux

• CVE-2020-11651 SaltStack Salt Authentication Bypass Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2020-7247 OpenSMTPD Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2019-16928 Exim Out-of-bounds Write Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2018-6789 Exim Buffer Overflow Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2015-2590 Oracle Java SE and Java SE Embedded Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8

All Canonical Ubuntu Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-42p7-ggcc-r5fp, UBUNTU-CVE-2013-1055.