CVE-2022-3136 in Social Rocket Plugin
Summary
by MITRE • 10/11/2022
The Social Rocket WordPress plugin before 1.3.3 does not sanitise and escape some of its settings, which could allow high privilege users such as admin to perform Stored Cross-Site Scripting attacks even when the unfiltered_html capability is disallowed (for example in multisite setup)
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 10/31/2022
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2022-3136 affects the Social Rocket WordPress plugin version 1.3.2 and earlier, representing a critical security flaw that undermines the integrity of WordPress multisite environments. This issue stems from inadequate input sanitization and output escaping mechanisms within the plugin's settings handling functionality, creating a persistent security risk for administrators and high-privilege users who interact with the plugin's administrative interface.
The technical flaw manifests in the plugin's failure to properly sanitize user-supplied input data before storing it in the WordPress database and subsequently rendering it in web pages without appropriate HTML escaping. This oversight creates a stored cross-site scripting vulnerability that allows malicious actors with administrative privileges to inject malicious scripts into the plugin's configuration settings. The vulnerability is particularly concerning because it can be exploited even when WordPress's unfiltered_html capability is restricted, which is a standard security practice in multisite installations where only trusted administrators should possess elevated permissions.
From an operational perspective, this vulnerability poses significant risks to WordPress multisite deployments where multiple administrators manage different sites within a single network. The stored XSS attack vector means that malicious scripts injected through the plugin settings will persist and execute whenever affected pages are loaded, potentially leading to session hijacking, privilege escalation, or data exfiltration. Attackers could leverage this vulnerability to gain unauthorized access to sensitive administrative functions or to compromise the entire multisite network through a single compromised plugin installation.
The security implications extend beyond immediate exploitation as this vulnerability directly violates several security principles outlined in the CWE (Common Weakness Enumeration) catalog, specifically CWE-79 which addresses Cross-Site Scripting vulnerabilities, and CWE-20 which covers Improper Input Validation. The ATT&CK framework categorizes this as a privilege escalation technique through web application vulnerabilities, where attackers exploit weak input validation to gain elevated privileges within the WordPress environment. Organizations using WordPress multisite setups are particularly vulnerable since the default security configurations that restrict unfiltered_html capability become ineffective against this specific flaw.
Mitigation strategies should focus on immediate plugin updates to version 1.3.3 or later, which contains the necessary sanitization and escaping fixes. Additionally, administrators should conduct thorough security audits of all installed plugins to identify similar vulnerabilities, implement proper input validation at multiple layers of the application, and consider additional security measures such as web application firewalls or content security policies to provide defense-in-depth protection against similar cross-site scripting attacks. Regular security monitoring and vulnerability assessment procedures should be implemented to detect and remediate such issues proactively across the entire WordPress ecosystem.