The Mozilla application platform currently has an unpatched input
validation flaw which allows you to specify arbitrary command line
arguments to any registered URL protocol handler process. Jesper
Johansson already detailed parts of this on his blog on July 20,
http://msinfluentials.com/blogs/jesper/. I wrote a vulnerability
report on July 18 together with a proof-of-concept exploit that
targeted Thunderbird 2.0.0.4.
Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 was released on July 19 and incidentally fixed
this specific attack vector through its "osint" command line flag. It
is now 6 days later and people should have had time to update their
Thunderbird installations, so I have decided to publish my
vulnerability report together with the exploits as they detail how to
handle XPI exploitation.
The HTML version can be found at
http://larholm.com/2007/07/25/mozilla-protocol-abuse/
A ZIP file with the report and the XPI exploits can be found at
http://larholm.com/media/2007/7/mozillaprotocolabuse.zip
Cheers
Thor Larholm