The Participants Database plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Sensitive Information Exposure in all versions up to, and including, 2.7.8.3 via the id parameter. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to overwrite arbitrary participant records by numeric ID and redirect the private_id-bearing record-access link to an attacker-controlled email address, granting full read and edit access to the victims stored personally identifiable information including names, email addresses, phone numbers, and any other fields collected in the participant database. An attacker can harvest a valid nonce with a plain unauthenticated GET request to any page rendering the public signup or record form, then POST action=update with an arbitrary id value to overwrite any record; chaining a subsequent action=retrieve then delivers the private-access link to the attacker-controlled mailbox.
Weakness
The product does not perform an authorization check when an actor attempts to access a resource or perform an action.
Potential Mitigations
- Divide the product into anonymous, normal, privileged, and administrative areas. Reduce the attack surface by carefully mapping roles with data and functionality. Use role-based access control (RBAC) [REF-229] to enforce the roles at the appropriate boundaries.
- Note that this approach may not protect against horizontal authorization, i.e., it will not protect a user from attacking others with the same role.
- Use a vetted library or framework that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
- For example, consider using authorization frameworks such as the JAAS Authorization Framework [REF-233] and the OWASP ESAPI Access Control feature [REF-45].
- For web applications, make sure that the access control mechanism is enforced correctly at the server side on every page. Users should not be able to access any unauthorized functionality or information by simply requesting direct access to that page.
- One way to do this is to ensure that all pages containing sensitive information are not cached, and that all such pages restrict access to requests that are accompanied by an active and authenticated session token associated with a user who has the required permissions to access that page.
Related Attack Patterns
References
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/participants-database/tags/2.7.8.3/classes/PDb_Shortcode.php#L1267
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/participants-database/tags/2.7.8.3/classes/PDb_submission/main_query/update_query.php#L57
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/participants-database/tags/2.7.8.3/participants-database.php#L1671
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/participants-database/tags/2.7.8.3/participants-database.php#L2437
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?reponame=\u0026old=3606851%40participants-database\u0026new=3606851%40participants-database
- https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/ff1b8d09-974a-4735-8b63-15084412090d?source=cve