coreActivity: Activity Logging for WordPress <= 3.0 - Unauthenticated PHP Object Injection via 'user_agent' Log Meta Field

The coreActivity: Activity Logging for WordPress plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to PHP Object Injection in all versions up to, and including, 3.0. This is due to the plugin failing to validate or strip PHP serialization syntax from the User-Agent HTTP header before storing it in the logmeta table, and subsequently calling `maybe_unserialize()` on every retrieved `meta_value` in `query_metas()` without verifying the data was originally serialized by the application. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers to inject a crafted PHP serialized payload via the User-Agent header during any logged event (such as a failed login attempt), which, when an administrator views the Logs page, is deserialized and passed to `DeviceDetector::setUserAgent()`, triggering a Fatal TypeError that creates a persistent Denial of Service condition blocking administrator access to the Logs page entirely.

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. Classes like this one can leave something behind, so the staged malware scanner is the second half: it looks for dropped files and modified code rather than for the request that created them. None of that substitutes for the fix: coreActivity 3.1 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

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• Login Security