Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 / Firefox 0.9.3 temporary files (local) Martin (broadcast@ptraced.net) ------------------- Program Description ------------------- "Thunderbird, our latest email program, includes intelligent spam filters, spell-checking, security, customization, and newsgroups support." www.mozilla.org ------------------- Problem Description ------------------- When opening an attachment, or a link included in an email, Thunderbird prompts the user with a dialog box, giving the choice to "Save to Disk" or to "Open with" . For example, we receive a PDF document attached, and on the Attachments section, we choose "Open". broadcast:/tmp$ ls -l *.pdf -rw------- 1 broadcast broadcast 2002560 2004-10-24 18:38 wskbq43m.pdf While the dialog box is still open, the file permissions are OK, and the filename is random (except for the extension). If we choose to save it to disk, and check /tmp again: broadcast:/tmp$ ls -l *.pdf ls: *.pdf: No such file or directory Great, it's gone. Now let's choose to open it with the default viewer (in my case, xpdf). Again, while the dialog box is open, there are no apparent problems. broadcast:/tmp$ ls -l *.pdf -rw------- 1 broadcast broadcast 2002560 2004-10-24 18:42 hp1h30si.pd But after choosing to open it with xpdf: broadcast:/tmp$ ls -l *.pdf -rw-r--r-- 1 broadcast broadcast 2002560 2004-10-24 18:42 programming.pdf The file becomes world readable, until the user closes xpdf, or whatever application he chose to read the attachment. Also, the filename becomes predictable, but if the filename already exists on /tmp, Thunderbird will choose a similar filename, and won't work on the existing one. This exact issue affects Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3. I haven't tested older/newer versions, and all of this was tested under Debian Unstable. A copy of this advisory and future updates on this issue may be found on: http://broadcast.ptraced.net/advisories/008-firefox.thunderbird.txt