CVE-2020-8615

Tutor LMS < 1.5.3 - Cross-Site Request Forgery

2020-02-04 00:00

Strategic Overview

Status: Patched in 1.5.3
Affected Plugin: Tutor LMS – eLearning and online course solution
Affected Version: < 1.5.3
CVSS: 8.8High
Weakness type: CWE-352 · Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF)
CVE: CVE-2020-8615

View all Tutor LMS – eLearning and online course solution vulnerabilities

At a glance

CVE-2020-8615 is a high-severity Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in the Tutor LMS WordPress plugin, affecting versions < 1.5.3. 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 1.5.3; sites on affected versions should update now. Disclosed February 2020, reported by Jinson Varghese Behanan.

Vulnerability Overview

A CSRF vulnerability in the Tutor LMS plugin before 1.5.3 for WordPress can result in an attacker approving themselves as an instructor and performing other malicious actions (such as blocking legitimate instructors).

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 Tutor LMS < 1.5.3 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 Tutor LMS the fix is 1.5.3: builds < 1.5.3 are affected, anything from 1.5.3 onward is not.

Remediation

Update to version 1.5.3, or a newer patched version

How does WordSec protect against this?

The attempt arrives as an ordinary request to Tutor LMS: WordSec's web application firewall inspects request payloads before WordPress loads them. None of that substitutes for the fix: Tutor LMS 1.5.3 closes this, and updating the plugin is the step that ends it.

Firewall
Alerts

External References

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2020-8615 https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/d276af21-fa9d-46bd-94e3-03776d4f2238 https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2020-8615

Related records

Same weakness class

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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