CVE-2019-17009 Path traversal in Firefox

What is CVE-2019-17009?

CVE-2019-17009 is a high-severity path traversal vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox, published on 8 Jan 2020. It can only be exploited from the same machine or local network, with no action from the victim.

Official description

When running, the updater service wrote status and log files to an unrestricted location; potentially allowing an unprivileged process to locate and exploit a vulnerability in file handling in the updater service. *Note: This attack requires local system access and only affects Windows. Other operating systems are not affected.*. This vulnerability affects Thunderbird < 68.3, Firefox ESR < 68.3, and Firefox < 71.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2019-17009?

It affects 4 products.

Products include Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Firefox Esr, Mozilla Thunderbird, Opensuse Leap.

How do I fix CVE-2019-17009?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade, and resolve every user-supplied path against an allowed base folder before opening it. More about Path traversal.

Is CVE-2019-17009 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2019-17009 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 CVE-2018-12380, GHSA-9wr8-jjcr-qw4x, UBUNTU-CVE-2019-17009.