The GiveWP – Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to PHP Object Injection in all versions up to, and including, 3.19.2 via deserialization of untrusted input from the donation form like firstName. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject a PHP Object. The additional presence of a POP chain allows attackers to delete arbitrary files on the server that makes remote code execution possible. Please note this was only partially patched in 3.19.3, a fully sufficient patch was not released until 3.19.4. However, another CVE was assigned by another CNA for version 3.19.3 so we will leave this as affecting 3.19.2 and before. We have recommended the vendor use JSON encoding to prevent any further deserialization vulnerabilities from being present.
The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently verifying that the resulting data will be valid.
It is often convenient to serialize objects for communication or to save them for later use. However, deserialized data or code can often be modified without using the provided accessor functions if it does not use cryptography to protect itself. Furthermore, any cryptography would still be client-side security – which is a dangerous security assumption. Data that is untrusted can not be trusted to be well-formed. When developers place no restrictions on “gadget chains,” or series of instances and method invocations that can self-execute during the deserialization process (i.e., before the object is returned to the caller), it is sometimes possible for attackers to leverage them to perform unauthorized actions, like generating a shell.