CVE-2023-5307

Contest Gallery < 21.2.8.1 - Unauthenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting via headers

2023-10-10 00:00
Dmitrii Ignatyev

Strategic Overview

Status
Patched in 21.2.8.1
Affected Plugin
Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe
Affected Version
< 21.2.8.1
CVSS
6.1Medium
Weakness type
CWE-79 · Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')
CVE
CVE-2023-5307
View all Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2023-5307 is a medium-severity Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting') vulnerability in the Contest Gallery WordPress plugin, affecting versions < 21.2.8.1. It carries a CVSS score of 6.1 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 21.2.8.1; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed October 2023, reported by Dmitrii Ignatyev.

Vulnerability Overview

The Photos and Files Contest Gallery – Contact Form, Upload Form, Social Share and Voting Plugin for WordPress plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Stored Cross-Site Scripting via headers in all versions up to 21.2.8.1 (exclusive) due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that will execute whenever a user accesses an injected page.

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-79: Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation ('Cross-site Scripting')

Reaching this weakness in Contest Gallery < 21.2.8.1 takes no account at all. Cross-site scripting happens when input from a request is written into a page without being escaped for the context it lands in, so the browser parses attacker-supplied text as markup or script.

Injected script runs with the privileges of whoever views the affected page, which is how these flaws turn into administrator session theft, silent account creation or persistent backdoors in page content. For Contest Gallery the fix is 21.2.8.1: builds < 21.2.8.1 are affected, anything from 21.2.8.1 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 21.2.8.1, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

Requests carrying this pattern arrive without a session, so nothing upstream of the firewall gets a chance to reject them: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Contest Gallery 21.2.8.1 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

  • Firewall
  • Login Security
  • Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2023-5307https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/3e3c9f08-9e73-4791-b6ca-2c8b9dc3fb81https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-5307

Related records

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