A serious security vulnerability existed in the WordPress plugin ReDi Restaurant Reservation. Specifically, researchers found an XSS vulnerability in the plugin that allowed an adversary to steal sensitive customer data.
ReDi Restaurant Reservation Plugin Vulnerability
Security researcher Bastijn Ouwendijk publicly shared the details of his findings of an XSS vulnerability in ReDi Restaurant Reservation plugin. It’s a popular WordPress plugin helping online businesses in managing reservations. Currently, the plugin boasts over 1000+ active installations.
As elaborated in his post, exploiting this bug could allow an attacker to run malicious codes to steal customers’ data. This may include customers’ reservation information without authentication.
Demonstrating the exploit, the researcher first uploaded a malicious JavaScript code to the server.
When the reservation form is submitted, a POST request is received by the website… The code shows data is not sanitized or validated before being saved to the variables… Next, the saved variables are pushed to the database. Also note here, that variables are not sanitized or validated before being pushed to the database. This means the strings we submit through the form for the variables UserName, UserPhone, UserEmail and UserComments will be saved to the database without changes.
After uploading the payload to the database, the next step requires loading it onto the webpage. For this, the researcher aimed at the Upcoming Reservation page that displays the reservations for a specific time. The researcher noticed that this webpage actually loaded from an iframe and had a separate source code. That’s where the JavaScript payload executed.
When the
https://upcoming.reservationdiary.eu/Entry/[API-key]/is loaded, and you click on ‘View upcoming reservations’ the JavaScript payload is executed twice.
Thus, an attacker may easily pilfer the plugin API key and thus, customers’ data.
The following video demonstrates the exploit.
Patch Released – Update Asap
Upon discovering the vulnerability, the researcher reached out to the developers who then worked out a patch.
The bug basically affected the plugin versions 20.0307 and earlier. Hence, the developers released the fix with ReDi Restaurant Reservations plugin version 21.0426.
Thus, all users must ensure updating their sites with the latest plugin version to avoid potential exploits.