WordPress Plugin Security Review: JM Twitter Cards
Recently we started reviewing the security of the WordPress plugins we use and for our second review we have checked over the security of the plugin JM Twitter Cards, which we recently started using.
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The review was done on version 10.0.1 of JM Twitter Cards. 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 the frontend portions of the plugin and in the admin portions accessible to users with the Author role or below
- Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in the admin portion of the plugin
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SQL injection vulnerabilities (the code that handles requests to the database)
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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
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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
One .php file, /languages/jm-tc-gut-translations.php, in the plugin is not intended to be directly accessed but does not contain protection against direct access. The file simply defines a variable, so there is nothing exploitable if it is accessed. The other files in the plugin do contain protection against direct access.