Wpgarlic – A Proof-Of-Concept WordPress Plugin Fuzzer

A proof-of-concept WordPress plugin fuzzer used in the research described in .

That means that the fuzzer detected executing fopen() on a known payload. Most of the payloads contain the word GARLIC in them to facilitate automatic detection in output. You may see or configure them in docker_image/magic_payloads.php.

Then, you may browse the source code and see that indeed the wp_ajax_rvm_import_markers endpoint uses the file content to render output, thus allowing you to read arbitrary files on the server: .

You can then manually test whether indeed this place (remember: in blue you have the endpoint name, here: the menu page name) is vulnerable to XSS. In this case, it is: .

Analysis of the endpoint’s code will tell you that this indeed leads to a stored XSS vulnerability: CVE-2021-25075.

False positives

Unfortunately, for most of the plugins the fuzzer doesn’t find any interesting crashes, and for the rest, most of the reports are false positives. For example, if you see:

Call: wp_mail arguments={'to': '[email protected]', 'subject': '[Plugin contact]  - http://GARLICGARLICGARLIC.example.com'}  

This can mean, that wp_mail is indeed called, but you don’t control the recipient and most of the subject. If you want to be sure, look at the plugin source.

Additional tips for reading fuzzer reports

• If you see the message; May as well be equal: … and … – that means that the mechanism to pretend that a known payload is equal to any other string (described in https://kazet.cc/2022/02/03/fuzzing-wordpress-plugins.html#patched-equality) was triggered.
• If you see __GARLIC_ACCESSED__ _FILES[files] __ENDGARLIC__ – that means that an uploaded file access was detected. No further checks are currently made – to check whether this is a vulnerability, look at the code.
• Sometimes what the fuzzer injects into GET, POST etc. parameters is not reproducible in the real world: for example, you can’t inject anything into $_GET['page'] if you want a particular menu page to be displayed.

Usage cheatsheet

The first run of fuzzing or of the tests may take about an hour, because we need to build the Docker image with instrumented PHP and WordPress.

Fuzzing a plugin by name

./bin/fuzz_plugin PLUGIN_SLUG  

Fuzzing a plugin from file

You can also install a plugin from a local zip file:

./bin/fuzz_plugin PLUGIN_FILE_NAME.zip  

Printing findings

To print what the fuzzer found, use:

./bin/print_findings data/plugin_fuzz_results/  

Running tests

To run the tests, use:

./bin/test  

Warning: the tests take long (more than an hour) and because they check whether the fuzzer would find vulnerabilities, they fail with some probability.

Reformatting code and running linters

To reformat and check the code, use:

./bin/reformat  

Manual testing environment

You may start a test environment with only one plugin installed using:

./bin/manual_testing PLUGIN_SLUG|PLUGIN_PATH.zip [version]  

You can install a plugin using its slug or from a local zip file.

It will listen on http://127.0.0.1:8001/

There will be two test users in the database:

• username: admin, password: admin, privileges: administrator
• username: subscriber, password: subscriber, privileges: subscriber

Extending and configuring the fuzzer

This tool is a proof of concept – this section contains places where it can be improved to find more vulnerabilities.

You may want to edit filtering.py — it contains the rules that deem a particular crash important or not. If you change them, you may have more false positives, but find more vulnerabilities as well. For example, the only header that I consider interesting when emitted is the Location header, to detect Open Redirect vulnerabilities. That is just one idea and you may have others.

Another file that may be worth extending is docker_image/patch_wordpress.sh. It describes calls to which functions will be logged as interesting.

If you want to inject other payloads (or change the probabilities with which they are injected) edit docker_image/magic_payloads.php and docker_image/fuzz/config.py.

crash_detector.py contans regular expressions that find interesting crashes or interesting information (e.g. e-mails) being exposed.

Fuzzing files (i.e. executing each PHP file with injected payloads) has been disabled because it didn’t lead to many findings. Uncomment files in config.DEFAULT_ENABLED_FEATURES to change that.

Fuzzer internals

Blocklists

Some plugins need other ones (e.g. woocommerce) as a dependency. When fuzzing a plugin that has a dependency, we want to fuzz only the chosen plugin and skip the dependency AJAX actions, REST routes and menu pages. We want to fuzz woocommerce actions/routes/pages only when we picked woocommerce to fuzz.

List of dependency actions/routes/pages are called blocklists and are listed in docker_image/blocklists/. Files named common contain the WordPress core actions/routes/pages – we don’t want to fuzz these as well.

To update these blocklists, use ./bin/update_blocklists.

FAQ

Fuzzer found something, is this a vulnerability?

Maybe. Install the plugin in a local test environment (for example you may use the one described in the Manual testing environment section) and analyze the bug.

Fuzzer found nothing, is the plugin secure?

Don’t assume that. The fuzzer finds some classes of vulnerabilities, but has its limitations.

Fuzzer founds nothing for most of the plugins – the purpose of the tool is rather to massively scan a large number of WordPress plugins, not to perform comprehensive tests of a single plugin.

Fuzzer found something in one run, but not in the next one. What happened?

This is possible. The fuzzer chooses payloads randomly, and introduces randomness in other places (e.g. how the== operator should behave in cases described in https://kazet.cc/2022/02/03/fuzzing-wordpress-plugins.html#patched-equality).

Doesn’t work? Have a question?

File a Github ticket or e-mail me: [email protected].