The Kirki WordPress plugin before 6.0.13 does not restrict which classes may be instantiated when it deserialises data that unauthenticated users can store, leading to PHP Object Injection that is triggered when an administrator later reviews the stored data. With a suitable gadget chain present on the site (via another installed Kirki WordPress plugin before 6.0.13, , or an outdated WordPress version), this could be leveraged to perform a variety of attacks, such as remote code execution.
Weakness
The product deserializes untrusted data without sufficiently ensuring that the resulting data will be valid.
Potential Mitigations
- Make fields transient to protect them from deserialization.
- An attempt to serialize and then deserialize a class containing transient fields will result in NULLs where the transient data should be. This is an excellent way to prevent time, environment-based, or sensitive variables from being carried over and used improperly.