The GenerateBlocks plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to information exposure due to missing object-level authorization checks in versions up to, and including, 2.1.2. This is due to the plugin registering multiple REST API routes under generateblocks/v1/meta/ that gate access with current_user_can(edit_posts), which is granted to low-privileged roles such as Contributor. The handlers accept arbitrary entity IDs (user IDs, post IDs, etc.) and meta keys, returning any requested metadata with only a short blacklist of password-like keys for protection. There is no object-level authorization ensuring the caller is requesting only their own data, and there is no allowlist of safe keys. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Contributor-level access and above, to exfiltrate personally identifiable information (PII) and other sensitive profile data of administrator accounts or any other users by directly querying user meta keys via the exposed endpoints via the get_user_meta_rest function. In typical WordPress + WooCommerce setups, this includes names, email, phone, and address fields that WooCommerce stores in user meta, enabling targeted phishing, account takeover pretexting, and privacy breaches.
The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.
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.