Light Blue Touchpaper

Last week I promised to follow up on a few XSS bugs that I found in Wordpress. The vulnerabilities are fixed in Wordpress 2.0.3, even though the release notes do not mention their existence. I think there are a number of useful lessons that can be drawn from them, so in this post I will describe some more details.

The goal of a classic XSS exploit is to run arbitrary Javascript, in the context of a another webpage, which retrieves the user’s cookies. With Wordpress I will concentrate on the comment management interface. Here, the deletion button has a Javascript onclick event handler to display a confirmation dialog, which includes the comment author’s name. If malicious input can break out of the dialog box text, then when an administrator activates the button, the attacker’s Javascript is run, allowing access to the admin user’s cookies. I found two classes of bugs which allowed me to do this.

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Users are strongly urged to upgrade their version of Wordpress to 2.0.3 (as you will see that we have already!) This release fixes two XSS vulnerabilities that I reported to Wordpress on 14 Apr 2006 and 4 May 2006, although they are not mentioned in the release announcement. These are exploitable in the default installation and can readily lead to arbitrary PHP code execution.

I think there a number of interesting lessons to learn from these vulnerabilities, so I plan to post more details in 10 days time (thereby giving users a chance to upgrade). The nature of the problem can probably be deduced from the code changes, so there is limited value in waiting much longer.

I will also discuss a refinement of the ‘cache’ shell injection bug reported by rgodm, which is also fixed by Wordpress 2.0.3. The new attack variant I discovered no longer relies on a guessable database password, but only applies when the Subscribe To Comments plugin is also activated. The latest version of the plugin (2.0.4) mitigates this attack, but upgrading Wordpress is still recommended.