Bug ID 1227486
Summary kmozillahelper touching the internet at all seems like a potentially significant security issue
Classification openSUSE
Product openSUSE Tumbleweed
Version Current
Hardware Other
OS Other
Status NEW
Severity Normal
Priority P5 - None
Component Security
Assignee security-team@suse.de
Reporter el@horse64.org
QA Contact qa-bugs@suse.de
Target Milestone ---
Found By ---
Blocker ---

kmozillahelper seems to look up hosts on its own. I noticed this when clicking
URLs where often they won't even reach firefox because kmozillahelper already
looked them up. I think this is in some environments a significant security
problem, since the user expectation is 1. the URL will be handled by their
browser and nothing else, 2. firefox supports DNS over TLS so the user may
expect their ISP doesn't see what URLs they're clicking, 3. unless
kmozillahelper perfectly replicates firefox's entire network stack including
reading its settings, that means it may be effectively bypassing all these
security settings without user consent and leaking the URLs to the ISP and
other parties without a warning.

My apologies if I just missed something, but if these observations are correct
then I think kmozillahelper as it conceptually seems to work right now is a
security hole. It shouldn't touch the internet whatsoever about the URLs, and
just hand them off to firefox.


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