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releases version backwards compatibility the wordpress project has a strong commitment to backwards compatibility this commitment means that themes plugins and custom code continues to function when wordpress core software is updated encouraging site owners to keep their wordpress version updated to the latest secure release wordpress and security the wordpress security team the wordpress security team is made up of approximately 50 experts including lead developers and security researchers about half are employees of automattic makers of wordpress com the earliest and largest wordpress hosting platform on the web and a number work in the web security field the team consults with well known and trusted security researchers and hosting companies 3 the wordpress security team often collaborates with other security teams to address issues in common dependencies such as resolving the vulnerability in the php xml parser used by the xml rpc api that ships with wordpress in wordpress 3 9 2 4 this vulnerability resolution was a result of a joint effort by both wordpress and drupal security teams wordpress security risks process and history the wordpress security team believes in responsible disclosure by alerting the security team immediately of any potential vulnerabilities potential security vulnerabilities can be signaled to the security team via the wordpress hackerone 5 the security team communicates amongst itself via a private slack channel and works on a walled off private trac for tracking testing and fixing bugs and security problems each security report is acknowledged upon receipt and the team works to verify the vulnerability and determine its severity if confirmed the security team then plans for a patch to fix the problem which can be committed to an upcoming release of the wordpress software or it can be pushed as an immediate security release depending on the severity of the issue for an immediate security release an advisory is published by the security team to the wordpress org news site 6 announcing the release and detailing the changes credit for the responsible disclosure of a vulnerability is given in the advisory to encourage and reinforce continued responsible reporting in the future administrators of the wordpress software see a notification on their site dashboard to upgrade when a new release is available and following the manual upgrade users are redirected to the about wordpress screen which details the changes if administrators have automatic background updates enabled they will receive an email after an upgrade has been completed automatic background updates for security releases starting with version 3 7 wordpress introduced automated background updates for all minor releases 7 such as 3 7 1 and 3 7 2 the wordpress security team can identify fix and push out automated security enhancements for wordpress without the site owner needing to do anything on their end and the security update will install automatically when a security update is pushed for the current stable release of wordpress the core team will also push security updates for all the releases that are capable of background updates since wordpress 3 7 so these older but still recent versions of wordpress will receive security enhancements individual site owners can opt to remove automatic background updates through a simple change in their configuration file but keeping the functionality is strongly recommended by the core team as well as running the latest stable release of wordpress 2013 owasp top 10 the open web application security project owasp is an online community dedicated to web application security the owasp top 10 list 8 focuses on identifying the most serious application security risks for a broad array of organizations the top 10 items are selected and prioritized in combination with consensus estimates of exploitability detectability and impact estimates the following sections discuss the apis resources and policies that wordpress uses to strengthen the core software and 3rd party plugins and themes against these potential risks a1 injection there is a set of functions and apis available in wordpress to assist developers in making sure unauthorized code cannot be injected and help them validate and sanitize data best practices and documentation are available 9 on how to use these apis to protect validate or sanitize input and output data in html urls http headers and when interacting with the database and filesystem administrators can also further restrict the types of file which can be uploaded via filters a2 broken authentication and session management wordpress core software manages user accounts and authentication and details such as the user id name and password are managed on the server side as well as the authentication cookies passwords are protected in the database using standard salting and stretching techniques existing sessions are destroyed upon logout for versions of wordpress after 4 0 a3 cross site scripting xss wordpress provides a range of functions which can help ensure that user supplied data is safe 10 trusted users that is administrators and editors on a single wordpress installation and network administrators only in wordpress multisite can post unfiltered html or javascript as they need to such as inside a post or page untrusted users and user submitted content is filtered by default to remove dangerous entities using the kses library through the wp_kses function as an example the wordpress core team noticed before the release of wordpress 2 3 that the function the_search_query was being misused by most theme authors who were not escaping the function s output for use in html in a very rare case of slightly breaking backward compatibility the function s output was changed in wordpress 2 3 to be pre escaped a4 insecure direct object reference wordpress often provides direct object reference such as unique numeric identifiers of user accounts or content available in the url or form fields while these identifiers disclose direct system information wordpress rich permissions and access control system prevent unauthorized requests a5 security misconfiguration the majority of the wordpress security configuration operations are limited to a single authorized administrator default settings for wordpress are continually evaluated at the core team level and the wordpress core team provides documentation and best practices to tighten security for server configuration for running a wordpress site 11 a6 sensitive data exposure wordpress user account passwords are salted and hashed based on the portable php password hashing framework 12 wordpress permission system is used to control access to private information such an registered users pii commenters email addresses privately published content etc in wordpress 3 7 a password strength meter was included in the core software providing additional information to users setting their passwords and hints on increasing strength wordpress also has an optional configuration setting for requiring https a7 missing function level access control wordpress checks for proper authorization and permissions for any function level access requests prior to the action being executed access or visualization of administrative urls menus and pages without proper authentication is tightly integrated with the authentication system to prevent access from unauthorized users a8 cross site request forgery csrf wordpress uses cryptographic tokens called nonces 13 to validate intent of action requests from authorized users to protect against potential csrf threats wordpress provides an api for the generation of these tokens to create and verify unique and temporary tokens and the token is limited to a specific user a specific action a specific object and a specific time period which can be added to forms and urls as needed additionally all nonces are invalidated upon logout a9 using components with known vulnerabilities the wordpress core team closely monitors the few included libraries and frameworks wordpress integrates with for core functionality in the past the core team has made contributions to several third party components to make them more secure such as the update to fix a cross site vulnerability in tinymce in wordpress 3 5 2 14 if necessary the core team may decide to fork or replace critical external components such as when the swfupload library was officially replaced by the plupload library in 3 5 2 and a secure fork of swfupload was made available by the security team 15 for those plugins who continued to use swfupload in the short term a10 unvalidated redirects and forwards wordpress internal access control and authentication system will protect against attempts to direct users to unwanted destinations or automatic redirects this functionality is also made available to plugin developers via an api wp_safe_redirect 16 further security risks and concerns xxe xml external entity processing attacks when processing xml wordpress disables the loading of custom xml entities to prevent both external entity and entity expansion attacks beyond php s core functionality wordpress does not provide additional secure xml processing api for plugin authors ssrf server side request forgery attacks http requests issued by wordpress are filtered to prevent access to loopback and private ip addresses additionally access is only allowed to certain standard http ports wordpress plugin and theme security the default theme wordpress requires a theme to be enabled to render content visible on the frontend the default theme which ships with core wordpress currently twenty twenty three has been vigorously reviewed and tested for security reasons by both the team of theme developers plus the core development team the default theme can serve as a starting point for custom theme development and site developers can create a child theme which includes some customization but falls back on the default theme for most functionality and security the default theme can be easily removed by an administrator if not needed wordpress org theme and plugin repositories there are approximately 50 000 plugins and 5 000 themes listed on the wordpress org site these themes and plugins are submitted for inclusion and are manually reviewed by volunteers before making them available on the repository inclusion of plugins and themes in the repository is not a guarantee that they are free from security vulnerabilities guidelines are provided for plugin authors to consult prior to submission for inclusion in the repository 17 and extensive documentation about how to do wordpress theme development 18 is provided on the wordpress org site each plugin and theme has the ability to be continually developed by the plugin or theme owner and any subsequent fixes or feature development can be uploaded to the repository and made available to users with that plugin or theme installed with a description of that change site administrators are notified of plugins which need to be updated via their administration dashboard when a plugin vulnerability is discovered by the wordpress security team they contact the plugin author and work together to fix and release a secure version of the plugin if there is a lack of response from the plugin author or if the vulnerability is severe the plugin theme is pulled from the public directory and in some cases fixed and updated directly by the security team the theme review team the theme review team is a group of volunteers led by key and established members of the wordpress community who review and approve themes submitted to be included in the official wordpress theme directory the theme review team maintains the official theme review guidelines 19 the theme unit test datas 20 and the theme check plugins 21 and attempts to engage and educate the wordpress theme developer community regarding development best practices inclusion in the group is moderated by core committers of the wordpress development team the role of the hosting provider in wordpress security wordpress can be installed on a multitude of platforms though wordpress core software provides many provisions for operating a secure web application which were covered in this document the configuration of the operating system and the underlying web server hosting the software is equally important to keep the wordpress applications secure a note about wordpress com and wordpress security wordpress com is the largest wordpress installation in the world and is owned and managed by automattic inc which was founded by matt mullenweg the wordpress project co creator wordpress com runs on the core wordpress software and has its own security processes risks and solutions 22 this document refers to security regarding the self hosted downloadable open source wordpress software available from wordpress org and installable on any server in the world appendix core wordpress apis the wordpress core application programming interface api is comprised of several individual apis 23 each one covering the functions involved in and use of a given set of functionality together these form the project interface which allows plugins and themes to interact with alter and extend wordpress core functionality safely and securely while each wordpress api provides best practices and standardized ways to interact with and extend wordpress core software the following wordpress apis are the most pertinent to enforcing and hardening wordpress security database api the database api 24 added in wordpress 0 71 provides the correct method for accessing data as named values which are stored in the database layer filesystem api the filesystem api 25 added in wordpress 2 6 26 was originally created for wordpress own automatic updates feature the filesystem api abstracts out the functionality needed for reading and writing local files to the filesystem to be done securely on a variety of host types it does this through the wp_filesystem_base class and several subclasses which implement different ways of connecting to the local filesystem depending on individual host support any theme or plugin that needs to write files locally should do so using the wp_filesystem family of classes http api the http api 27 added in wordpress 2 7 28 and extended further in wordpress 2 8 standardizes the http requests for wordpress the api handles cookies gzip encoding and decoding chunk decoding if http 1 1 and various other http protocol implementations the api standardizes requests tests each method prior to sending and based on your server configuration uses the appropriate method to make the request permissions and current user api the permissions and current user api 29 is a set of functions which will help verify the current user s permissions and authority to perform any task or operation being requested and can protect further against unauthorized users accessing or performing functions beyond ...