For our fifteenth security review of a WordPress plugin based on the voting of our customers, we reviewed the plugin Nav Menu Roles.

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The review was done on version 1.9.1 of Nav Menu Roles. It has been a few months since we last did a review and in that time we have added six additional items that we check on during the review. We checked for the following issues during this review:

• Insecure file upload handling (this is the cause of the most exploited type of vulnerability, arbitrary file upload)
• Deserialization of untrusted data
• Security issues with functions accessible through WordPress’ AJAX functionality (those are a common source of disclosed vulnerabilities these days)
• Persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in publicly accessible portions of the plugin
• Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in the admin portion of plugins
• SQL injection vulnerabilities (the code that handles requests to the database)
• Reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities
• Security issues with functions accessible through any of the plugin’s shortcodes
• Security issues with functions accessible through the admin_action action
• Security issues with functions accessible through the admin_init action
• Security issues with import/export functionality
• Security issues with usage of is_admin()
• Host header injection vulnerabilities
• Lack of protection against unintended direct access of PHP files
• Insecure and unwarranted requests to third-party websites

Results

During the review we only found one minor issue:

Lack of Protection Against Direct Access to Files

Three of the five .php files in the plugin lack code at the beginning of the file to restrict direct access to the files. As those three files only define classes, there is nothing exploitable due to that.