CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2022-2939

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: Sep 06, 2022 | Modified: Sep 13, 2022
CVSS 3.x
5.3
MEDIUM
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
Ubuntu

The WP Cerber Security plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to security protection bypass in versions up to, and including 9.0, that makes user enumeration possible. This is due to improper validation on the value supplied through the author parameter found in the ~/cerber-load.php file. In vulnerable versions, the plugin only blocks requests if the value supplied is numeric, making it possible for attackers to supply additional non-numeric characters to bypass the protection. The non-numeric characters are stripped and the user requested is displayed. This can be used by unauthenticated attackers to gather information about users that can targeted in further attacks.

Weakness

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Wp_cerber_security,anti-spam&_malware_scan Cerber * 9.0 (including)

Extended Description

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:

Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:

Information exposures can occur in different ways:

It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Potential Mitigations

  • Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
  • Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

References