CVE-2025-1435

bbPress <= 2.6.11 - Cross-Site Request Forgery to Limited Privilege Escalation

2025-03-04 00:00
Brian Mungai

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 2.6.12
Affected Plugin
bbPress
Affected Version
<= 2.6.11
CVSS
6.3Medium
Weakness type
CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CVE
CVE-2025-1435
View all bbPress vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2025-1435 is a medium-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the bbPress WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 2.6.11. It carries a CVSS score of 6.3 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 2.6.12; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed March 2025, reported by Brian Mungai.

Vulnerability Overview

The bbPress plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery in all versions up to, and including, 2.6.11. This is due to missing or incorrect nonce validation on the bbp_user_add_role_on_register() function. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to elevate their privileges to that of a bbPress Keymaster via a forged request granted they can trick a site administrator into performing an action such as clicking on a link. Rather than implementing a nonce check to provide protection against this vulnerability, which would break functionality, the plugin no longer makes it possible to select a role during registration.

Technical Analysis

The vector marks this flaw as remotely reachable over the network, with low attack complexity — no special timing or configuration is needed, and no privileges on the target site.

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

bbPress <= 2.6.11 carries this weakness at bbp_user_add_role_on_register(), and reaching it 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 bbPress the fix is 2.6.12: builds <= 2.6.11 are affected, anything from 2.6.12 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 2.6.12, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to bbPress: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: bbPress 2.6.12 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2025-1435https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/2d776d94-8c81-4e88-bae3-946824a75c09https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2025-1435

Related records

Vulnerability data © Defiant, Inc., provided under the Wordfence Intelligence T&C