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Cross-site Scripting occurrences in Profilepress
The User Registration, User Profile, Login & Membership – ProfilePress (Formerly WP User Avatar) WordPress plugin before 3.1.11's widget for tabbed login/register was not properly escaped and could be used in an XSS attack which could lead to wp-admin access. Further, the plugin in several places assigned $_POST as $_GET which meant that in some cases this could be replicated with just $_GET parameters and no need for $_POST values. (2021-08-09, CVE-2021-24522)
The User Registration, User Profiles, Login & Membership – ProfilePress (Formerly WP User Avatar) WordPress plugin before 3.1.8 did not sanitise or escape some of its settings before saving them and outputting them back in the page, allowing high privilege users such as admin to set JavaScript payloads in them even when the unfiltered_html capability is disallowed, leading to an authenticated Stored Cross-Site Scripting issue (2021-08-02, CVE-2021-24450)
Why Cross-site Scripting can be dangerous
Cross site scripting is an attack where a web page executes code that is injected by an adversary. It usually appears, when users input is presented. This attack can be used to impersonate a user, take over control of the session, or even steal API keys.
The attack can be executed e.g. when you application injects the request parameter directly into the HTML code of the page returned to the user:
https://server.com/confirmation?message=Transaction+Complete
what results in:
<span>Confirmation: Transaction Complete</span>
In that case the message can be modified to become a valid Javascript code, e.g.:
https://server.com/confirmation?message=<script>dangerous javascript code here</script>
and it will be executed locally by the user's browser with full access to the user's personal application/browser data:
<span>Confirmation: <script>dangerous javascript code here</script></span>