CVE-2024-41816 in Cooked Plugin
Summary
by MITRE • 08/05/2024
Cooked is a recipe plugin for WordPress. The Cooked plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Persistent Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) via the ‘[cooked-timer]’ shortcode in versions up to, and including, 1.8.0 due to insufficient input sanitization and output escaping. This vulnerability allows authenticated attackers with subscriber-level access and above to inject arbitrary web scripts in pages that will execute whenever a user accesses a compromised page. This issue has been addressed in release version 1.8.1. All users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 03/15/2025
The Cooked WordPress plugin vulnerability represents a critical security flaw that affects users of the popular recipe management system. This vulnerability exists within the plugin's handling of the '[cooked-timer]' shortcode functionality, which has been identified as susceptible to persistent cross-site scripting attacks. The issue impacts all versions up to and including 1.8.0, making it a widespread concern for WordPress installations that rely on this recipe plugin for content management and user engagement.
The technical root cause of this vulnerability stems from inadequate input sanitization and output escaping mechanisms within the plugin's codebase. Specifically, when the '[cooked-timer]' shortcode processes user input, it fails to properly validate or sanitize the data before rendering it in web pages. This insufficient sanitization creates an opportunity for malicious actors to inject malicious JavaScript code that persists in the plugin's database or configuration files. The vulnerability is particularly concerning because it requires only subscriber-level access or higher, meaning that attackers with relatively low privileges can exploit this flaw to compromise the entire WordPress installation.
From an operational perspective, this vulnerability poses significant risks to WordPress site administrators and their users. The persistent nature of the XSS attack means that once malicious scripts are injected, they will execute automatically whenever any user accesses compromised pages containing the vulnerable shortcode. This creates a potential attack surface that could be exploited to steal user sessions, redirect visitors to malicious websites, or even execute further attacks against the underlying WordPress infrastructure. The vulnerability affects all users who access pages containing the compromised shortcode, making it particularly dangerous for sites with high user traffic or those that rely heavily on recipe content sharing.
The exploitation of this vulnerability aligns with several ATT&CK framework techniques including T1566.001 (Phishing: Spearphishing Attachment) and T1059.007 (Command and Scripting Interpreter: JavaScript), as attackers could leverage the persistent XSS to deliver malicious payloads that execute in users' browsers. From a CWE perspective, this vulnerability maps to CWE-79 (Cross-site Scripting) with specific characteristics related to persistent XSS where the malicious script is stored on the server and executed against multiple users. The weakness also relates to CWE-20 (Improper Input Validation) and CWE-116 (Improper Encoding or Escaping of Output), indicating multiple layers of input/output handling failures that contribute to the vulnerability's existence.
The fix implemented in version 1.8.1 addresses this vulnerability through comprehensive input sanitization and proper output escaping mechanisms. This upgrade ensures that all user-provided data within the '[cooked-timer]' shortcode is properly validated and escaped before being rendered in web pages. The remediation follows established security best practices for preventing XSS attacks, including the implementation of Content Security Policy headers and proper HTML encoding of user-supplied content. Security researchers and WordPress administrators should prioritize upgrading to version 1.8.1 or later to eliminate this attack vector and protect their sites from potential exploitation. Organizations using the Cooked plugin should also conduct security audits of their existing content to identify any previously injected malicious scripts that may have been introduced through this vulnerability.