CVE-2011-3640

Severity: high (CVSS 7.1 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: yes
Published: 2011-10-28 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-426

Description

Untrusted search path vulnerability in Mozilla Network Security Services (NSS), as used in Google Chrome before 17 on Windows and Mac OS X, might allow local users to gain privileges via a Trojan horse pkcs11.txt file in a top-level directory. NOTE: the vendor's response was "Strange behavior, but we're not treating this as a security bug."

Affected products

Google Chrome: before 17.0 — fixed in 17.0

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Google Chrome 17.0. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

http://blog.acrossecurity.com/2011/10/google-chrome-pkcs11txt-file-planting.html
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=97426
http://securityreason.com/securityalert/8483
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641052
https://hermes.opensuse.org/messages/13154861
https://hermes.opensuse.org/messages/13155432
https://oval.cisecurity.org/repository/search/definition/oval%3Aorg.mitre.oval%3Adef%3A13414
http://blog.acrossecurity.com/2011/10/google-chrome-pkcs11txt-file-planting.html
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=97426
http://securityreason.com/securityalert/8483
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=641052
https://hermes.opensuse.org/messages/13154861

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