Cyber Resilience

CVE-2023-5174

Critical

Published: 27 September 2023

Published
27 September 2023
Modified
05 May 2025
KEV Added
—
Patch
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CVSS Score v3.1 9.8 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0044 63.9th percentile
Risk Priority 20 60% EPSS · 20% KEV · 20% CVSS

Summary

CVE-2023-5174 is a critical-severity Use After Free (CWE-416) vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox. Its CVSS base score is 9.8 (Critical).

Operationally, ranked in the top 36.1% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability details

If Windows failed to duplicate a handle during process creation, the sandbox code may have inadvertently freed a pointer twice, resulting in a use-after-free and a potentially exploitable crash. *This bug only affects Firefox on Windows when run in non-standard…

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configurations (such as using `runas`). Other operating systems are unaffected.* This vulnerability affects Firefox < 118, Firefox ESR < 115.3, and Thunderbird < 115.3.

CWE(s)
CWE-416

Related Threats

No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.

Affected Assets

mozilla
firefox
≤ 118
mozilla
firefox esr
≤ 115.3
mozilla
thunderbird
≤ 115.3

Mitigating Controls

Likely Mitigating Controls AI

Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.

SI-16 Memory Protection
addresses: CWE-416

Use-after-free exploits that achieve arbitrary code execution are blocked or significantly hardened by non-executable pages and ASLR.

References