tarteaucitron.js – Cookies legislation & GDPR <= 1.5.4 - Cross-Site Request Forgery to Cross-Site Scripting
Strategic Overview
- Status
- Patched in 1.6
- Affected Plugin
- tarteaucitron.io
- Affected Version
<= 1.5.4- CVSS
- 8.8High
- Weakness type
- CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
- CVE
CVE-2021-36887
At a glance
CVE-2021-36887 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the tarteaucitron.io WordPress plugin, affecting versions <= 1.5.4. 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 1.6; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed December 2021, reported by Julio Potier.
Vulnerability Overview
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability leading to Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) discovered in tarteaucitron.js – Cookies legislation & GDPR WordPress plugin (versions <= 1.5.4), vulnerable parameters "tarteaucitronEmail" and "tarteaucitronPass".
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)
tarteaucitron.io <= 1.5.4 carries this weakness at tarteaucitronEmail, 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 tarteaucitron.io the fix is 1.6: builds <= 1.5.4 are affected, anything from 1.6 onward is not.
Remediation
Update to version 1.6, or a newer patched version
How does WordSec protect against this?
The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to tarteaucitron.io: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: tarteaucitron.io 1.6 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.
- Firewall
- Alerts
External References
Related records
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