Mozilla's head of security yesterday confirmed a bug in Firefox that could be used by attackers to scout out a system prior to mounting a more thorough assault. The flaw, said Window Snyder, Mozilla Corp.'s chief security officer, is in the browser's chrome protocol, she said in response to reports of the vulnerability and the public posting of a proof-of-concept exploit. "Chrome" is the Firefox term for its user interface. Access to a user's machine would be through one of many Firefox extensions packaged in a flat file structure, rather than collected into a single Java archive, or .jar file, said Snyder. Several popular add-ons, including Download Statusbar and Greasemonkey, use a flat file structure. "Users are only at risk if they have one of the 'flat' packaged add-ons installed," Snyder said on the Mozilla security blog.
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