302147 - firefox should be sandboxed

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 302146

(Firefox :: Security, defect)

Description

[t t]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050720 Firefox/1.0.6
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.10) Gecko/20050720 Firefox/1.0.6

i did not find any bug resembling this, but i did not know what to search for. 
the closest was a java related thing, and that's unrelated except in spirit.

perhaps i am way off base here.  i cannot really believe that what appears to be
the case really is.  if so, i apologize in advance.

i discovered to my surprise that a download extension (downthemall or flashgot;
doesn't matter which) actually installs a shell script and executes it upon the
user's downloading something.  of course it's not the fault of that extension
that it is able to do arbitrary things.

this was a huge surprise to me because i assumed that ff would naturally be
sandboxed in such a way that an extension could not do arbitrary things to a
computer without the user having given permission.  after all, web site js can't
do much, and you can restrict it further to avoid spoofing attacks.  so why can
extensions do anything?

i assumed that extensions would be sandboxed but plugins would not be.  i
assumed that extensions were js code and data files, and that js was sandboxed.

my assumptions were probably too naive, i will admit.  but why isn't it possible
to have a finer grained security model here?

go ahead and close this out for "user too naive" if you like :-) but i wanted to
start this bug so it exists in the db for other users and developers with
childlike expectations of being able to play in a sandbox.


Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.  write an extension that 0wns the luser.

Comment 1

[Daniel Veditz [:dveditz]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 302146 ***