CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-6857 — When resolving a symlink, a race may occur where the buffer passed to `readlink` may actually be smaller than necessary

Medium CVSS 5.3

When resolving a symlink, a race may occur where the buffer passed to `readlink` may actually be smaller than necessary. *This bug only affects Firefox on Unix-based operating systems (Android, Linux, MacOS). Windows is unaffected.* This vulnerability affects Firefox ESR < 115.6, Thunderbird < 115.6, and Firefox < 121.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
5.3 (3.1)
Published
2023-12-19
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
browser
Weaknesses
CWE-362

Affected products

  • mozilla / firefox
  • mozilla / firefox_esr
  • mozilla / thunderbird
  • debian / debian_linux / 10.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 11.0
  • debian / debian_linux / 12.0

Matched remediation archetype

Race condition, TOCTOU, and lifecycle synchronization

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Check exposure

  • Map concurrent actors, shared state, lock boundaries, signals, callbacks, retries, and check-then-use sequences in the affected path.
  • Determine whether untrusted users can influence timing, object names, filesystem state, or repeated state transitions.
  • Identify clustered and multi-process behavior that repository-local tests may not represent.

Remediate safely

  • Make the sensitive state transition atomic or protect it with a consistently ordered synchronization primitive.
  • Perform authorization and invariant checks on the same authoritative object and transaction used for the operation.
  • Use unique private resources, safe ownership transfer, and idempotent operations; add deterministic concurrency regression tests.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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