Executive brief
WP Photo Album Plus is a popular WordPress plugin for managing and displaying photo galleries. An unauthenticated attacker can inject malicious scripts that execute in the browsers of users who visit affected pages, potentially allowing credential theft, session hijacking, or website defacement. The vulnerability exploits a flawed nonce check that logs user-supplied HTTP headers without proper sanitization.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a Stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) flaw arising from insufficient input sanitization and output escaping of the 'HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR' header. The vulnerable code is in the getshortcodedrenderedfenodelay AJAX action, which intentionally fails nonce validation; this failure triggers wppa_log() to write the attacker-controlled header value directly to disk. An unauthenticated attacker can send crafted requests with malicious payloads in the X-Forwarded-For header via the wp_ajax_nopriv_wppa endpoint. When logged data is later retrieved and displayed on the front-end without proper escaping, the injected script executes in visitors' browsers. The vulnerability affects all versions up to and including 9.2.08.003; patch status is not explicitly stated but should be verified against the vendor's advisory.
Affected products
- WP Photo Album Plus WP Photo Album Plus up to and including 9.2.08.003
Timeline
- 2026-09-11: disclosed