The Social Streams plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to privilege escalation in all versions up to, and including, 1.0.1. This is due to the plugin not properly validating a users identity prior to updating their user meta information in the update_user_meta() function. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to change their user type to that of an administrator.
Weakness
The elevated privilege level required to perform operations such as chroot() should be dropped immediately after the operation is performed.
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