CVE-2016-1979 Use after free in n/a

What is CVE-2016-1979?

CVE-2016-1979 is a high-severity use after free vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox, published on 13 Mar 2016. 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

Use-after-free vulnerability in the PK11_ImportDERPrivateKeyInfoAndReturnKey function in Mozilla Network Security Services (NSS) before 3.21.1, as used in Mozilla Firefox before 45.0, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service or possibly have unspecified other impact via crafted key data with DER encoding.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2016-1979?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Network Security Services.

How do I fix CVE-2016-1979?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade to the fixed version. These bugs are found with fuzzing and sanitisers and avoided by memory-safe languages. More about Use after free.

Is CVE-2016-1979 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2016-1979 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Mozilla Firefox

• CVE-2019-11708 Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird Sandbox Escape Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2010-3765 Mozilla Multiple Products Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2022-26486 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.6
• CVE-2022-26485 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited High 8.8
• CVE-2019-11707 Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird Type Confusion Exploited High 8.8

All Mozilla Firefox vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as DEBIAN-CVE-2016-1979, GHSA-3v3j-hr3p-qv6j, UBUNTU-CVE-2016-1979.