For our 20th security review of a WordPress plugin based on the voting of our customers, we reviewed the plugin Custom Login.

If you are not yet a customer of the service once you sign up for the service as a paying customer you can start suggesting and voting on plugins to get security reviews. For those already using the service that haven’t already suggested and voted for plugins to receive a review, you can start doing that here. You can use our tool for doing limited automated security checks of plugins to see if plugins you are using have possible issues that would make them good candidates to get a review. You can also order a review of a plugin separately from our service.

The review was done on version 2.2.1 of Custom Login. 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 the plugin
• 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()
• Security issues with usage of add_option(), delete_option(), and update_option()
• Host header injection vulnerabilities
• Lack of protection against unintended direct access of PHP files
• Insecure and unwarranted requests to third-party websites
• Any additional possible issues identified by our Plugin Security Checker

Results

We found one really minor issue.

Lack of Protection Against Direct Access to PHP Files

A number of the .php files for the third party library CSSTidy included with the plugin are not intended to be directly accessed but do not contain protection against direct access. We didn’t see anything that could be exploited in the files without the restriction in place.

Worth noting is that the plugin isn’t using the latest version of CSSTidy, though at least it isn’t using the original CSSTidy, which contains a security vulnerability that other plugins have included years after its disclosure.