CVE-2022-4651 in Justified Gallery Plugin
Summary
by MITRE • 01/30/2023
The Justified Gallery WordPress plugin before 1.7.1 does not validate and escape one of its shortcode attributes, which could allow users with a role as low as contributor to perform Stored Cross-Site Scripting attack.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 03/27/2025
The vulnerability identified as CVE-2022-4651 affects the Justified Gallery WordPress plugin, specifically versions prior to 1.7.1, presenting a critical security risk through stored cross-site scripting flaws. This issue arises from insufficient input validation and output escaping mechanisms within the plugin's shortcode attribute handling, creating an avenue for malicious actors to inject persistent script code into the WordPress environment. The vulnerability's severity is amplified by the fact that it can be exploited by users holding the contributor role, which represents one of the lowest privileged user levels within WordPress's role-based access control system, making the attack surface significantly broader than typical XSS vulnerabilities that require higher privileges.
The technical flaw manifests in the plugin's failure to properly sanitize and escape shortcode attributes before rendering them in the web page output. When a contributor user creates or modifies content containing a maliciously crafted Justified Gallery shortcode, the plugin processes the unvalidated input without adequate security measures. This oversight allows attackers to embed malicious JavaScript code within the gallery shortcode parameters, which then gets stored in the WordPress database and executed whenever the gallery is rendered to other users. The stored nature of this XSS vulnerability means that the malicious payload persists even after the initial injection, making it particularly dangerous as it can affect multiple users over extended periods without requiring repeated exploitation attempts.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple script execution, as it can enable attackers to perform various malicious activities including session hijacking, credential theft, and data exfiltration. Once an attacker successfully injects malicious code through the stored XSS vector, they can potentially steal user sessions, redirect victims to phishing sites, or manipulate the gallery display to show malicious content. The contributor role access level means that even users who typically have limited capabilities within WordPress can leverage this vulnerability to compromise the entire site's security. This represents a significant escalation of privilege threat where low-privilege users can effectively gain the ability to perform actions that should be restricted to higher-level administrators.
The vulnerability aligns with CWE-79, which specifically addresses Cross-Site Scripting flaws in software applications, and demonstrates how insufficient input validation and output escaping creates persistent security risks. From an ATT&CK framework perspective, this vulnerability maps to techniques such as T1566.001 for credential access through social engineering and T1059.001 for command and control through scripting. The issue also reflects broader concerns about plugin security in WordPress ecosystems, where third-party components often lack the rigorous security testing and validation that core platform components undergo. Organizations using the affected plugin version face significant risk of unauthorized access and potential data breaches, particularly in environments where contributor-level users have access to content creation capabilities. The remediation strategy requires immediate patching to version 1.7.1 or later, along with comprehensive review of all stored content that may have been compromised, and implementation of additional security monitoring to detect potential exploitation attempts.
The vulnerability highlights the importance of proper input validation and output escaping practices in web applications, particularly when dealing with user-generated content that gets rendered in web contexts. WordPress plugin developers must implement robust sanitization routines for all shortcode attributes and ensure that user input is properly escaped before being stored or displayed. Security teams should also consider implementing web application firewalls and content security policies as additional protective measures against similar vulnerabilities in other plugins and themes. The incident underscores the critical need for regular security audits of WordPress installations and the importance of maintaining up-to-date software components to prevent exploitation of known vulnerabilities.