Vulnerabilities > CVE-2020-7916 - Improper Privilege Management vulnerability in Thimpress Learnpress

047910
CVSS 4.0 - MEDIUM
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
SINGLE
Confidentiality impact
PARTIAL
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
NONE
network
low complexity
thimpress
CWE-269

Summary

be_teacher in class-lp-admin-ajax.php in the LearnPress plugin 3.2.6.5 and earlier for WordPress allows any registered user to assign itself the teacher role via the wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=learnpress_be_teacher URI without any additional permission checks. Therefore, any user can change its role to an instructor/teacher and gain access to otherwise restricted data.

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • Restful Privilege Elevation
    Rest uses standard HTTP (Get, Put, Delete) style permissions methods, but these are not necessarily correlated generally with back end programs. Strict interpretation of HTTP get methods means that these HTTP Get services should not be used to delete information on the server, but there is no access control mechanism to back up this logic. This means that unless the services are properly ACL'd and the application's service implementation are following these guidelines then an HTTP request can easily execute a delete or update on the server side. The attacker identifies a HTTP Get URL such as http://victimsite/updateOrder, which calls out to a program to update orders on a database or other resource. The URL is not idempotent so the request can be submitted multiple times by the attacker, additionally, the attacker may be able to exploit the URL published as a Get method that actually performs updates (instead of merely retrieving data). This may result in malicious or inadvertent altering of data on the server.