Critical Privilege Escalation in HT Mega Plugin Affecting 100k+ Sites

This blog post is about the HT Mega plugin critical vulnerability. If you’re a HT Mega user, please update the plugin to at least version 2.2.1.

Patchstack paid plan users are protected from the vulnerability. You can also sign up for the Patchstack Community plan to be notified about vulnerabilities as soon as they become disclosed.

For plugin developers, we have security audit services and Threat Intelligence Feed API for hosting companies.

About the HT Mega plugin

The plugin HT Mega (versions 2.2.0 and below, free version), which has over 100,000 active installations is known as one of the more popular Elementor addons plugin in WordPress. This plugin is developed by HasThemes.

This plugin is an Elementor addons package for WordPress. It is a complete package of widgets, pre-designed templates, forms, tables, and so on. It empowers us to build a professional website in WordPress from blog widget, slider widget, accordion widget.

The security vulnerability

This plugin suffers from an unauthenticated privilege escalation vulnerability and allows any unauthenticated user to escalate their privilege to that of any role on the WordPress site.

It is possible to register a new user account with any arbitrary role which could allow an unauthenticated user to register with administrator role which is the highest privileged role on a default site. This vulnerability occurs because the code that handle user registration process directly assign user role from user supplied input without any check and validation. The described vulnerability was fixed in version 2.2.1 and assigned CVE-2023-37999.

The underlying vulnerability is located in the function htmega_ajax_register:

function htmega_ajax_register() {

    $user_data = array(
        'user_login'    => !empty( $_POST['reg_name'] ) ? $_POST['reg_name']: "",
        'user_pass'     => !empty( $_POST['reg_password'] ) ? $_POST['reg_password']: "",
        'user_email'    => !empty( $_POST['reg_email'] ) ? $_POST['reg_email']: "",
        'user_url'      => !empty( $_POST['reg_website'] ) ? $_POST['reg_website']: "",
        'first_name'    => !empty( $_POST['reg_fname'] ) ? $_POST['reg_fname']: "",
        'last_name'     => !empty( $_POST['reg_lname'] ) ? $_POST['reg_lname']: "",
        'nickname'      => !empty( $_POST['reg_nickname'] ) ? $_POST['reg_nickname']: "",
        'description' => !empty( $_POST['reg_bio'] ) ? $_POST['reg_bio']  : "",
        'role'        => !empty( $_POST['reg_role'] ) ? $_POST['reg_role']: get_option( 'default_role' ),
    );
    $messages = !empty( $_POST['messages'] ) ? $_POST['messages']: "";
    if( $messages ){
        $messages = json_decode( stripslashes( $messages ), true );
    }
    

    if( htmega_validation_data( $user_data ) !== true ){
        echo htmega_validation_data( $user_data, $messages  );
    }else{
        $register_user = wp_insert_user( $user_data );
-------------------------------------- CUTTED HERE --------------------------------------

Above function serves as a function handler of wp_ajax_nopriv_htmega_ajax_register ajax action. Note that $userdata variable is constructed from multiple values including the role value that is directly retrieved from $_POST['reg_role'].

There is a check using the htmega_validation_data function, but it only checks for the validity of the username, email, password and user URL. Since there is no proper check on the role value, we can specify any user role that we want when registering a new user account.

The patch

Since this vulnerability exists because the code directly assigns a role from user supplied input without proper validation, removing the direct role assignment should be enough to patch the issue. The patch can be seen below:

Conclusion

For plugin and theme developer, pay extra attention and apply additional security checks on the custom user registration handler. Always check and validate a role value if it can be directly supplied by the user. We recommend assigning default_role option as a default role value for custom user registration.

Disclosure note

Since we’ve detected that third-parties have had access to the vulnerability information via monitoring the changelog , we’ve decided to disclose the vulnerability early.

Help us make the Internet a safer place

Making the WordPress ecosystem more secure is a team effort, and we believe that plugin developers and security researchers should work together.

• If you’re a plugin developer, join our mVDP program that makes it easier to report, manage and address vulnerabilities in your software.
• If you’re a security researcher, join Patchstack Alliance to report vulnerabilities & earn rewards.