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Author: James Golovich

Advanced Custom Fields < 5.12.3 can allow unauthenticated users to upload arbitrary files

Arbitrary File Upload

Advanced Custom Fields and Advanced Custom Fields Pro have 2+ million installs according to wordpress.org. Versions older than 5.12.3 allow unauthenticated users to upload arbitrary files if there is a frontend form available. This vulnerability was introduced in the 5.0 rewrite and did not exist prior to that release.

Fortunately by default WordPress does not allow uploading of .php files so this vulnerability is not easily wormable, but there are many other file types that can be uploaded that can be then used with another exploit to execute code or used in a phishing attack to get a user to download and execute a resource from a “trusted” site.

No exploit code is being released at this time.

Timeline

  • 7/11/2022 Contacted developer
  • 7/12/2022 Disclosed vulnerability
  • 7/13/2022 Patch received from developer for testing
  • 7/14/2022 Fix deployed to GitHub and pushed to wordpress.org plugin repository

Elementor Page Builder < 1.8 allows logged in users unrestricted editing

Elementor Page Builder versions less than 1.8 contain a major security issue that allows logged in users (not just admin) unrestricted access to the Elementor specific backend functions.  This allows unrestricted importing/exporting of content and potentially complete site compromise. The WordPress.org repository claims there are over 300,000 active installations.

If you are running an older version, upgrade immediately.  The Elementor team did not appear to be planning any disclosure or notification and the only indication in the changelog of any potential issues is “Fix! – Patched nonce validation for all library actions” along with additional nonce related fixes over the next few days to deal with bugs related to this patching.

Details

Due to the large number of installs I will not describe the exact steps to exploit these methods.  Many of the AJAX actions are accessible to any logged in user.  Some of the actions are protected with the ‘elementor-editing’ nonce, unfortunately that was leaked to any logged in user via the WordPress heartbeat.

Timeline

  • 10/17/2017 Sent initial contact inquiry
  • 10/18/2017 Received response and disclosure sent
  • 10/26/2017 Followup message sent to check status
  • 11/7/2017 Version 1.8.0 released

WordPress shortcode injection as an attack vector

Summary

This is not about a specific vulnerability but an intrusion vector often overlooked by WordPress plugin and theme developers. Frequently code is used that allows attackers to execute arbitrary shortcodes or shortcodes are added that do not provide sufficient validation or check authorization. After all, shortcodes are intended to be used by site editors who are expected to have high credentials, though an attacker doesn’t play by the rules.

What is a shortcode?

Shortcodes were introduced in WordPress version 2.5 back in 2008 as a way for editors to include dynamically generated content in WordPress posts. Initially the available shortcodes were rather limited but plugin and theme developers quickly embraced the API. Shortcodes allow passing attributes and content data to custom functions that return textual data to be included with the post.

Default shortcodes available in WordPress 4.7.2

The default shortcodes are relatively safe but many third party developers have added functionality that makes it easier for WordPress site administrators to extend their site without doing custom PHP coding. Generally the shortcodes added are benign and allow building feature rich WordPress websites, though sometimes the shortcodes provide features that can be leveraged for nefarious purposes.

Shortcode functionality I have seen in various third party plugins

  • Include arbitrary files from the file system
  • Execute arbitrary PHP code
  • Retrieve arbitrary data from WordPress custom post type fields
  • Generate HTML forms that allow editing WordPress posts or users
  • View content that is supposed to be protected by password or other specific protections
  • Provide list of discount codes for an E-Commerce plugin

Who does this affect?

If you are using stock WordPress without any third party plugins or themes you should be safe from any known attack. I’ve posted in the past about specific vulnerabilities but there are some issues I’ve uncovered during research that have not been resolved yet so I will not disclose them until they are fixed.

Depending on the site setup, a user with a Contributor, Author, or Editor role could potentially use shortcodes to escalate their privileges to that of an administrator. With the default roles and capabilities a user with the Contributor role can create posts but they must be approved before being published, but a Contributor can preview their own posts which will cause any included shortcodes to be executed.

How can a developer help prevent these types of an attack?

There are 2 major aspects developers need to be concerned with.

Allowing shortcode injection

Anytime a developer feels the need to call do_shortcode() they should ensure that user input is not passed into the function or be properly sanitized, just like with any other user input.

Keeping shortcodes secure

Any shortcode added with add_shortcode() should check that the logged in user has proper credentials to execute the action. All attributes passed should be properly validated as if the input comes from an untrusted attacker.

Securing shortcodes going forward

I wish there was a holy grail to solve this issue with a couple lines of code, but it’s not a trivial issue to tackle. If a developer could specify capabilities required to insert a specific shortcode then post editors could filter out shortcodes that an author should not have access to, for instance administrator only shortcodes.

I use some simple custom code that adds a filter on ‘pre_do_shortcode_tag’ to restrict shortcodes I explicitly want to allow, security plugins could add some whitelisting/blacklisting of shortcodes but this would likely cause a significant amount of support issues when features suddenly stop working.

Following is a code example to show how to restrict the shortcodes allowed to only the ones that come with stock WordPress.

add_filter( 'pre_do_shortcode_tag', 'pritect_whitelist_shortcodes', 10, 4 );
function pritect_whitelist_shortcodes( $return, $tag, $attr = array(), $m = array() ) {
    if ( in_array( $tag, array( 'audio', 'caption', 'embed', 'gallery', 'playlist', 'video' ) ) ) {
        return $return;
    }
    return '';
}

I hope one day WordPress has a security permission system setup that requires plugins and themes to specify capabilities they use and allow the site administrator to authorize or revoke specific permissions, but that is a large moving target that I wouldn’t expect to be implemented for years (if ever).