CVE-2017-5492

WordPress Core < 4.7.1 - Cross-Site Request Forgery via Widget Editing

2017-01-11 00:00

Strategic Overview

Status: Patched in 3.7.17
Affected Core: WordPress 4.7
Affected Version: 3.7 – 4.7 · 12 branches
CVSS: 8.8High
Weakness type: CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CVE: CVE-2017-5492

At a glance

CVE-2017-5492 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the WordPress 4.7 WordPress release line, affecting 3.7 – 4.7 · 12 branches. It carries a CVSS score of 8.8 (low attack complexity; high confidentiality, integrity, availability impact). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 3.7.17; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed January 2017, reported by Ronnie Skansing.

Vulnerability Overview

Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the widget-editing accessibility-mode feature in WordPress before 4.7.1 allows remote attackers to hijack the authentication of unspecified victims for requests that perform a widgets-access action, related to wp-admin/includes/class-wp-screen.php and wp-admin/widgets.php.

Technical Analysis

The vector marks this flaw as requiring local or adjacent access, with low attack complexity — no special timing or configuration is needed, and no privileges on the target site. A successful exploit has high impact on confidentiality, integrity, availability — full site compromise territory.

CWE-352: Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)

Reaching this weakness in WordPress 4.7 3.7 – 4.7 · 12 branches takes a caller who can reach the endpoint. Cross-site request forgery abuses the fact that browsers attach a victim's cookies to any request, so a state-changing action that only checks who you are, not whether you meant to act, can be triggered from another site.

An attacker who gets a logged-in user to load a crafted page can perform that action as them, with the impact scaling to whatever the victim's role is allowed to do. For WordPress 4.7 the fix is 3.7.17: builds 3.7 – 4.7 · 12 branches are affected, anything from 3.7.17 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to one of the following versions, or a newer patched version: 3.7.17, 3.8.17, 3.9.15, 4.0.14, 4.1.14, 4.2.11, 4.3.7, 4.4.6, 4.5.5, 4.6.2, 4.7.1

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to WordPress 4.7: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: updating to 3.7.17 is the step that ends it.

Firewall
Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2017-5492 https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/91e61664-3b98-4a97-b35c-1ec88034d05b https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-5492

Related records

Same weakness class

Other vulnerabilities in WordPress 4.7

CVSS Vector

8.8

CVSS:3.1/AV:A/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:C/C:H/I:H/A:H

Base

Attack VectorAdjacent
Attack ComplexityLow
Privileges RequiredNone
User InteractionRequired
ScopeChanged
ConfidentialityHigh
IntegrityHigh
AvailabilityHigh

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