A high-severity safety flaw has been disclosed within the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for WordPress that might permit an unauthenticated menace actor to raise their privileges and carry out malicious actions.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-50550 (CVSS rating: 8.1), has been addressed in model 6.5.2 of the plugin.
“The plugin suffers from an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability which permits any unauthenticated customer to realize administrator degree entry after which malicious plugins could possibly be uploaded and put in,” Patchstack safety researcher Rafie Muhammad mentioned in an evaluation.
LiteSpeed Cache is a well-liked website acceleration plugin for WordPress that, because the identify implies, comes with superior caching performance and optimization options. It is put in on over six million websites.
The newly recognized subject, per Patchstack, is rooted in a operate named is_role_simulation and is much like an earlier flaw that was publicly documented again in August 2024 (CVE-2024-28000, CVSS rating: 9.8).
It stems from using a weak safety hash test that could possibly be brute-forced by a nasty actor, thus permitting for the crawler characteristic to be abused to simulate a logged-in person, together with an administrator.
Nevertheless, a profitable exploitation banks on the next plugin configuration –
- Crawler -> Common Settings -> Crawler: ON
- Crawler -> Common Settings -> Run Length: 2500 – 4000
- Crawler -> Common Settings -> Interval Between Runs: 2500 – 4000
- Crawler -> Common Settings -> Server Load Restrict: 0
- Crawler -> Simulation Settings -> Position Simulation: 1 (ID of person with administrator position)
- Crawler -> Abstract -> Activate: Flip each row to OFF besides Administrator
The patch put in place by LiteSpeed removes the position simulation course of and updates the hash era step utilizing a random worth generator to keep away from limiting the hashes to 1 million prospects.
“This vulnerability highlights the essential significance of making certain the power and unpredictability of values which are used as safety hashes or nonces,” Muhammad mentioned.
“The rand() and mt_rand() capabilities in PHP return values that could be ‘random sufficient’ for a lot of use instances, however they don’t seem to be unpredictable sufficient for use in security-related options, particularly if mt_srand is utilized in a restricted risk.”
CVE-2024-50550 is the third safety flaw to be disclosed in LiteSpeed throughout the final two months, the opposite two being CVE-2024-44000 (CVSS rating: 7.5) and CVE-2024-47374 (CVSS rating: 7.2).
The event comes weeks after Patchstack detailed two essential flaws in Final Membership Professional that might lead to privilege escalation and code execution. However the shortcomings have been addressed in model 12.8 and later.
- CVE-2024-43240 (CVSS rating: 9.4) – An unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability that might permit an attacker to register for any membership degree and achieve the connected position for it
- CVE-2024-43242 (CVSS rating: 9.0) – An unauthenticated PHP object injection vulnerability that might permit an attacker to execute arbitrary code.
Patchstack can be warning that the ongoing authorized drama between WordPress’ father or mother Automattic and WP Engine has prompted some builders to desert the WordPress.org repository, necessitating that customers monitor acceptable communication channels to make sure they’re receiving the most recent details about doable plugin closures and safety points.
“Customers who fail to manually set up plugins faraway from the WordPress.org repository danger not receiving new updates which might embrace vital safety fixes,” Patchstack CEO Oliver Sild mentioned. “This will depart web sites uncovered to hackers who generally exploit identified vulnerabilities and will take benefit over such conditions.”
