The Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of its Firefox browser that fixes two critical security bugs in the software that were reported over the past week.

The most widely reported flaw concerns the International Domain Name (IDN) feature that Mozilla products use to process Web pages that do not use the Latin alphabet (see "Security flaw targets Firefox, Linux users").

Links pointing to a host with a long name composed entirely of dashes could be crafted so that earlier versions of Firefox would execute arbitrary code of an attacker's choosing. That means an attacker theoretically could use the flaw to take control of a user's machine by launching a buffer overflow attack.

Firefox 1.0.7, released this morning, also fixes a critical flaw in the way the Mozilla software handles Unix and Linux shell commands that could allow attackers to run unauthorized software on some systems, said Chris Beard, head of products with Mozilla Corp.

All Firefox users are encouraged to download the new release, which also contains a number of minor changes designed to make the browser more stable and secure.