(RHSA-2013:1142) Important: thunderbird security update

Mozilla Thunderbird is a standalone mail and newsgroup client.

Several flaws were found in the processing of malformed content. Malicious
content could cause Thunderbird to crash or, potentially, execute arbitrary
code with the privileges of the user running Thunderbird. (CVE-2013-1701)

A flaw was found in the way Thunderbird generated Certificate Request
Message Format (CRMF) requests. An attacker could use this flaw to perform
cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks or execute arbitrary code with the
privileges of the user running Thunderbird. (CVE-2013-1710)

A flaw was found in the way Thunderbird handled the interaction between
frames and browser history. An attacker could use this flaw to trick
Thunderbird into treating malicious content as if it came from the browser
history, allowing for XSS attacks. (CVE-2013-1709)

It was found that the same-origin policy could be bypassed due to the way
Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI) were checked in JavaScript. An attacker
could use this flaw to perform XSS attacks, or install malicious add-ons
from third-party pages. (CVE-2013-1713)

It was found that web workers could bypass the same-origin policy. An
attacker could use this flaw to perform XSS attacks. (CVE-2013-1714)

It was found that, in certain circumstances, Thunderbird incorrectly
handled Java applets. If a user launched an untrusted Java applet via
Thunderbird, the applet could use this flaw to obtain read-only access to
files on the user’s local system. (CVE-2013-1717)

Red Hat would like to thank the Mozilla project for reporting these issues.
Upstream acknowledges Jeff Gilbert, Henrik Skupin, moz_bug_r_a4, Cody
Crews, Federico Lanusse, and Georgi Guninski as the original reporters of
these issues.

Note: All of the above issues cannot be exploited by a specially-crafted
HTML mail message as JavaScript is disabled by default for mail messages.
They could be exploited another way in Thunderbird, for example, when
viewing the full remote content of an RSS feed.

All Thunderbird users should upgrade to this updated package, which
contains Thunderbird version 17.0.8 ESR, which corrects these issues. After
installing the update, Thunderbird must be restarted for the changes to
take effect.