Executive brief
Kirki is a popular WordPress plugin used to customize theme options and settings. The plugin fails to properly check user permissions on certain API endpoints, allowing anyone to retrieve sensitive information including registered user email addresses, comment author details, and non-public page settings without logging in. This exposes private data that should be restricted to administrators.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a missing capability check in Kirki's public AJAX action "kirki_get_apis". While the endpoint requires a wp_rest nonce for CSRF protection, the nonce is publicly available in the page footer for all visitors, making it trivial to obtain. Unauthenticated attackers can leverage this nonce to call endpoints like "get-users-of-collection" and "get-comments" to enumerate user email addresses and comment metadata including IP addresses and approval status. The vulnerability affects Kirki versions before 6.0.14 and is fixed in version 6.0.14 and later.
Affected products
- Kirki Kirki before 6.0.14
Timeline
- 2026-08-24: disclosed
- 2026-08-26: patched: Version 6.0.14 released