CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-4578 — When calling `JS::CheckRegExpSyntax` a Syntax Error could have been set which would end in calling `convertToRuntimeErrorAndClear`

Medium CVSS 6.5

When calling `JS::CheckRegExpSyntax` a Syntax Error could have been set which would end in calling `convertToRuntimeErrorAndClear`. A path in the function could attempt to allocate memory when none is available which would have caused a newly created Out of Memory exception to be mishandled as a Syntax Error. This vulnerability affects Firefox < 117, Firefox ESR < 115.2, and Thunderbird < 115.2.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-09-11
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
browser
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

  • mozilla / firefox
  • mozilla / firefox_esr
  • mozilla / thunderbird

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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