For the last three false reports of vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins we have discussed, there has been a common denominator that we don’t quite understand. Each has involved a claim that a plugin has a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability, but in the proof of concept for exploiting each of the vulnerabilities there has been nonce included. Seeing a nonce is what is used in WordPress to protect against that type of vulnerability, we have a hard time understanding what is going on here, other than people without the proper knowledge to make a claim that this type of vulnerability exist are in fact doing that.

When used in a form a simple version of the nonce looks like this:

<input type="hidden" id="_wpnonce" name="_wpnonce" value="aa27b52873" />

While it is not required to actually use the word “nonce”, in most cases it will be labeled as such.

While the existence of a valid looking nonce in a proof of concept of a vulnerability likely indicates that the report is false, the existence of a nonce in a plugin’s pages is not always an indication that there is not a CSRF vulnerability, as plugins do not always actually check if the nonce exists or that it is valid when processing the request tied to it. One way to test out if the CSRF protection is properly functioning is to use the developer tools in your web browser to modify the value of the nonce or remove it and see if the request is still successful.