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Fencer Intel
medium 6.8

CVE-2012-4205 json

Mozilla Firefox before 17.0, Thunderbird before 17.0, and SeaMonkey before 2.14 assign the system principal, rather than the sandbox princi…

published 2012-11-21 13 y ago modified 2026-06-16 4 mo ago also EUVD-2012-4149

cvss
6.8
version 2.0, NVD
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
1.6%
EPSS 1.6% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 76%
public exploits
0
none known

Summary

Mozilla Firefox before 17.0, Thunderbird before 17.0, and SeaMonkey before 2.14 assign the system principal, rather than the sandbox principal, to XMLHttpRequest objects created in sandboxes, which allows remote attackers to conduct cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks or obtain sensitive information by leveraging a sandboxed add-on.

Patch / fix

  • mozilla firefox 17.0
  • mozilla seamonkey 2.14
  • mozilla thunderbird 17.0
  • firefox-esr openSUSE Tumbleweed 128.5.1-1.1
  • MozillaFirefox openSUSE Tumbleweed 50.1.0-1.1
  • MozillaThunderbird openSUSE Tumbleweed 45.5.1-1.1

opensuse advisories openSUSE-SU-2024:14572-1openSUSE-SU-2024:10071-1openSUSE-SU-2024:10230-1

Vendor advisories

What the vendors themselves say about their products: affected, fixed or not affected, and what to do.

red hat product security vex CVE-2012-4205 updated cvss 4.3

Mozilla: XMLHttpRequest inherits incorrect principal within sandbox (MFSA 2012-97)

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 firefox, thunderbird Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 firefox, thunderbird
    not affected: vulnerable code not present

Red Hat CSAF VEX © Red Hat, Inc., from https://security.access.redhat.com/data/csaf/v2/vex/; changed: reduced to product statuses and remediations. CC BY 4.0 · csaf

Exploit prediction

1.61% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 76% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-09).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
NVD 2.0 6.8 AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:P/I:P/A:P

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-352 Cross-Site Request Forgery

References

Sources

Fencer Intel keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.