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Path Traversal occurrences in Ultimate Member
The Ultimate Member plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to directory traversal in versions up to, and including 2.5.0 due to insufficient input validation on the 'template' attribute used in shortcodes. This makes it possible for attackers with administrative privileges to supply arbitrary paths using traversal (../../) to access and include files outside of the intended directory. If an attacker can successfully upload a php file then remote code execution via inclusion may also be possible. Note: for users with less than administrative capabilities, /wp-admin access needs to be enabled for that user in order for this to be exploitable by those users. (2022-11-29, CVE-2022-3361)
A vulnerability, which was classified as critical, has been found in Ultimate Member Plugin up to 2.5.0. This issue affects the function load_template of the file includes/core/class-shortcodes.php of the component Template Handler. The manipulation of the argument tpl leads to pathname traversal. The attack may be initiated remotely. Upgrading to version 2.5.1 is able to address this issue. The name of the patch is e1bc94c1100f02a129721ba4be5fbc44c3d78ec4. It is recommended to upgrade the affected component. The identifier VDB-213545 was assigned to this vulnerability. (2022-11-13, CVE-2022-3966)
Why Path Traversal can be dangerous
Relative Path Confusion means that your web server is configured to serve responses to ambiguous URLs. This configuration can possibly cause confusion about the correct relative path for the URL. It is also an issue of resources, such as images, styles etc., which are specified in the response using relative path, not the absolute URL.
If the web browser permits to parse "cross-content" response, the attacker may be able to fool the web browser into interpreting HTML into other content types, which can then lead to a cross site scripting attack (link do XSS).