CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2021-29951 — Mozilla Firefox security vulnerability
The Mozilla Maintenance Service granted SERVICE_START access to BUILTIN|Users which, in a domain network, grants normal remote users access to start or stop the service. This could be used to prevent the browser update service from operating (if an attacker spammed the 'Stop' command); but also exposed attack surface in the maintenance service. *Note: This issue only affected Windows operating systems older than Win 10 build 1709. Other operating systems are unaffected.*. This vulnerability affects Thunderbird < 78.10.1, Firefox < 87, and Firefox ESR < 78.10.1.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 6.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2021-06-24
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- browser
- Weaknesses
- CWE-269
Affected products
- mozilla / firefox
- mozilla / firefox_esr
- mozilla / thunderbird
Matched remediation archetype
Privilege escalation and unsafe privilege management
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Map service accounts, operating-system identities, roles, capabilities, impersonation, set-user transitions, and administrative helper paths.
- Determine whether untrusted users or lower-privilege processes can reach the affected transition or modify inputs it trusts.
- Review file, socket, registry, device, job, container, and cloud-role permissions used before and after privilege changes.
Remediate safely
- Apply the supported fix and redesign privileged operations as a minimal, authenticated, allowlisted interface.
- Drop privileges before processing untrusted input, verify the drop succeeds, and remove unnecessary roles, capabilities, and write permissions.
- Validate ownership and permissions at time of use and add explicit lower-to-higher privilege boundary tests.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
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