CVE-2012-3990

Severity: critical (CVSS 9.3 v2.0)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 5.2% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2012-10-10 · updated 2026-06-16
Weakness: CWE-416

Description

Use-after-free vulnerability in the IME State Manager implementation in Mozilla Firefox before 16.0, Firefox ESR 10.x before 10.0.8, Thunderbird before 16.0, Thunderbird ESR 10.x before 10.0.8, and SeaMonkey before 2.13 allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via unspecified vectors, related to the nsIContent::GetNameSpaceID function.

Affected products

Canonical Ubuntu Linux: 10.04, 11.04, 11.10, 12.04
Debian Linux: 6.0
Mozilla Firefox: before 10.0.8; before 16.0 — fixed in 10.0.8, 16.0
Mozilla Seamonkey: before 2.13 — fixed in 2.13
Mozilla Thunderbird: before 16.0 — fixed in 16.0
Mozilla Thunderbird ESR: before 10.0.8 — fixed in 10.0.8
RedHat Enterprise Linux Desktop: 5.0, 6.0
RedHat Enterprise Linux Eus: 6.3
RedHat Enterprise Linux Server: 5.0, 6.0
RedHat Enterprise Linux Workstation: 5.0, 6.0
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15 SP1: 10-sp4, 11-sp3
SUSE Linux Enterprise Sdk: 10-sp4
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server: 10-sp4, 11-sp3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Mozilla Firefox 10.0.8, 16.0; Mozilla Seamonkey 2.13; Mozilla Thunderbird 16.0; Mozilla Thunderbird ESR 10.0.8. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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