WordPress Plugin Vulnerabilities

ProfilePress < 4.16.18 - Unauthenticated Privilege Escalation via Registration Role Selection

Description

The plugin does not consistently enforce the role restriction configured on its front-end registration role-selection field. The set of roles offered to the visitor and the set of roles the registration handler accepts are derived by two different parsers, and for some valid ways of configuring the offered roles the handler ignores the restriction and falls back to accepting any non-administrator role. Combined with the absence of a nonce on the public registration handler, this allows an unauthenticated visitor to register an account with a higher role, such as Editor or Author, than the form was configured to offer.

Proof of Concept

Affects Plugins

Fixed in 4.16.18

References

Classification

Miscellaneous

Original Researcher
Muni Nitish Kumar Yaddala
Submitter
Muni Nitish Kumar Yaddala
Verified
Yes

Timeline

Publicly Published
2026-07-03 (about 21 days ago)
Added
2026-07-03 (about 20 days ago)
Last Updated
2026-07-23 (about 9 hours ago)

Other