CVE-2017-18521

Democracy Poll <= 5.3.6 - Cross-Site Request Forgery

2017-02-23 00:00

Strategic Overview

Status: Patched in 5.4
Affected Plugin: Democracy Poll
Affected Version: <= 5.3.6
CVSS: 8.8High
Weakness type: CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CVE: CVE-2017-18521

At a glance

CVE-2017-18521 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Democracy Poll WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 5.3.6. It carries a CVSS score of 8.8 (reachable over the network; low attack complexity; high confidentiality, integrity, availability impact). Exploitation requires no authentication. The issue is fixed in version 5.4; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed February 2017.

Vulnerability Overview

The democracy-poll plugin before 5.4 for WordPress has CSRF via wp-admin/options-general.php?page=democracy-poll&subpage=l10n.

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. 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 Democracy Poll <= 5.3.6 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 Democracy Poll the fix is 5.4: builds <= 5.3.6 are affected, anything from 5.4 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 5.4, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Democracy Poll: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Democracy Poll 5.4 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

Firewall
Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2017-18521 https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/b9567f63-9161-49a3-9b94-dd6dee5a5628 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2017-18521

Related records

Other vulnerabilities in Democracy Poll

CVSS Vector

8.8

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

Base

Attack VectorNetwork
Attack ComplexityLow
Privileges RequiredNone
User InteractionRequired
ScopeUnchanged
ConfidentialityHigh
IntegrityHigh
AvailabilityHigh

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