1234931 - Register Firefox's desired LSP category during installation

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 523410

(Firefox :: Installer, defect)

Description

[(No longer employed by Mozilla) Aaron Klotz]

One possible option for improving the rogue LSP situation (at least on Vista and newer) is for Gecko to register its LSP category via the WSCSetApplicationCategory API. Any LSPs that do not set their categories will simply not be loaded by winsock2.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wndp/archive/2006/02/09/529031.aspx
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms742253%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

Obviously one concern with that could be the fact that this may not be desired by some users (probably in enterprise environments). OTOH, one would hope that their LSPs were up to date...

ni? Patrick to see what he thinks about this idea...

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #1233237 +++

[Tracking Requested - why for this release]:

This bug was filed from the Socorro interface and is 
report bp-cdb9688e-7cda-4ada-8f1a-7ed192151215.
=============================================================
Crashing Thread (7)
Frame 	Module 	Signature 	Source
Ø 0 	nvappfilter.dll 	nvappfilter.dll@0xa387 	
Ø 1 	nvappfilter.dll 	nvappfilter.dll@0x618d 	
2 	nss3.dll 	_MD_CloseSocket 	nsprpub/pr/src/md/windows/w95sock.c
3 	nss3.dll 	SocketClose 	nsprpub/pr/src/io/prsocket.c
4 	xul.dll 	mozilla::net::ClosingService::ThreadFunc() 	netwerk/base/ClosingService.cpp
5 	nss3.dll 	_PR_NativeRunThread 	nsprpub/pr/src/threads/combined/pruthr.c
6 	nss3.dll 	pr_root 	nsprpub/pr/src/md/windows/w95thred.c
7 	msvcr120.dll 	_callthreadstartex 	f:\dd\vctools\crt\crtw32\startup\threadex.c:376
8 	msvcr120.dll 	msvcr120.dll@0x2c000 	
9 	kernel32.dll 	BaseThreadStart

after firefox 43 was released, there seems to be a spike in signatures containing dll files related to Nvidia's Network Access Manager.
at the moment the combination of these signatures make up around 3% of crash data in early incoming firefox 43 and predominantly windows xp, 7 and vista are affected.

Comment 1

[(No longer employed by Mozilla) Aaron Klotz]

Hmm, based on the MSDN docs, it looks like this would need to be set at install time due to requiring elevated Administrator creds.

Comment 2

[Robert Strong (they/them - no direct email)]

We've done this previously and ended up having to back out the changes. See bug 523410 and related bugs for more info.

Comment 3

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

bug 523410 is instructive.. it not only links to the regressions that caused it to be disabled (which are in some cases security features being relied on), but contains some impressive crash reductions (so it also works).

its probably not going to be of help.

Comment 4

[(No longer employed by Mozilla) Aaron Klotz]

Thanks for the info Robert and Patrick, sounds like this isn't the best way forward here.