Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability in Simple Membership WordPress Plugin

Abstract

A Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability was found in the Simple Membership WordPress Plugin. This issue allows an attacker to perform a wide variety of actions, such as stealing Administrators' session tokens, or performing arbitrary actions on their behalf. In order to exploit this issue, the attacker has to lure/force a logged on WordPress Administrator into opening a malicious website.

OVE ID

OVE-20160712-0016

Tested versions

This issue was successfully tested on Simple Membership WordPress Plugin version 3.2.8.

Fix

This issue is resolved in Simple Membership version 3.2.9.

Introduction

The Simple Membership WordPress Plugin adds membership functionality to your site. Protect members only content using content protection easily. A Cross-Site Scripting vulnerability was found in the Simple Membership WordPress Plugin. This issue allows an attacker to perform a wide variety of actions, such as stealing Administrators' session tokens, or performing arbitrary actions on their behalf. In order to exploit this issue, the attacker has to lure/force a logged on WordPress Administrator into opening a malicious website.

Details

The issue exists in several PHP files and is caused by the lack of output encoding on the page request parameter. The vulnerable code is listed below.

class.swpm-members.php:

'edit' => sprintf('<a href="admin.php?page=%s&member_action=edit&member_id=%s">Edit</a>', **$_REQUEST['page']**, $item['member_id']),
	
[...]
	
onclick="return confirm(\'Are you sure you want to delete this entry?\')">Delete</a>', **$_REQUEST['page']**, $item['member_id']),

class.swpm-membership-levels.php:

'edit' => sprintf('<a href="admin.php?page=%s&level_action=edit&id=%s">Edit</a>', **$_REQUEST['page']**, $item['id']),
	
[...]
	
onclick="return confirm(\'Are you sure you want to delete this entry?\')">Delete</a>', **$_REQUEST['page']**, $item['id']),

admin_members_list.php:

<input type="hidden" name="page" value="<?php **echo $_REQUEST['page'];** ?>" />

admin_all_payment_transactions.php:

<input type="hidden" name="page" value="<?php **echo $_REQUEST['page'];** ?>" />

Normally, the page URL parameter is validated by WordPress, which prevents Cross-Site Scripting. However in this case the value of page is obtained from $_REQUEST, not from $_GET. This allows for parameter pollution where the attacker puts a benign page value in the URL and simultaneously submits a malicious page value as POST parameter.

Proof of concept

<html>
	<body>
		<form action="http://<target>/wp-admin/admin.php?page=simple_wp_membership" method="POST">
			<input type="hidden" name="page" value="&quot;<script>alert(document.cookie);</script>" />
			<input type="submit" value="Submit request" />
		</form>
	</body>
</html>

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