HTTP Headers <= 1.19.2 - Authenticated (Administrator+) External Control of File Name or Path to RCE via 'hh_htpasswd_path' and 'hh_www_authenticate_user' Parameters

The HTTP Headers plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to External Control of File Name or Path leading to Remote Code Execution in all versions up to and including 1.19.2. This is due to insufficient validation of the file path stored in the 'hh_htpasswd_path' option and lack of sanitization on the 'hh_www_authenticate_user' option value. The plugin allows administrators to set an arbitrary file path for the htpasswd file location and does not validate that the path has a safe file extension (e.g., restricting to .htpasswd). Additionally, the username field used for HTTP Basic Authentication is written directly into the file without sanitization. The apache_auth_credentials() function constructs the file content using the unsanitized username via sprintf('%s:{SHA}%s', $user, ...), and update_auth_credentials() writes this content to the attacker-controlled path via file_put_contents(). This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Administrator-level access and above, to write arbitrary content (including PHP code) to arbitrary file paths on the server, effectively achieving Remote Code Execution.

An attacker needs Administrator access first, so the firewall sees the attempt as traffic from a logged-in account: 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. No patched version is recorded yet, which is the case where a filtering layer matters most, because there is nothing to update to.

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