Introduction
Privilege escalation through a single click can result in full administrative compromise of a WooCommerce store. CVE-2025-12095 exposes a critical flaw in the Simple Registration for WooCommerce plugin, allowing unauthenticated attackers to escalate privileges if they can convince an administrator to interact with a crafted link. This plugin is widely used in the WordPress e-commerce ecosystem, with over 5000 active installations, making the impact of this vulnerability significant for online businesses relying on WooCommerce for customer registration and management.
About the Plugin: Simple Registration for WooCommerce is a popular WordPress plugin developed by Astoundify. It streamlines the user registration process for WooCommerce-powered stores, offering customizable registration forms and role management features. Its user base includes thousands of small to medium-sized e-commerce sites globally. The plugin's role management capabilities are central to its functionality, which makes any privilege escalation flaw particularly impactful.
Technical Information
CVE-2025-12095 is a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability affecting all versions of the Simple Registration for WooCommerce plugin up to and including 1.5.8. The root cause is the absence of nonce validation in the role requests admin page handler, specifically in the includes/display-role-admin.php file. Nonces are a standard WordPress security mechanism designed to prevent CSRF by ensuring that sensitive actions are performed intentionally by authenticated users.
Vulnerability Details:
- The vulnerable code path processes role approval requests without verifying a WordPress nonce. This allows attackers to craft a malicious request that, if executed by an authenticated administrator (for example, by clicking a malicious link), will approve a pending role request and escalate privileges.
- The attack does not require authentication from the attacker. The only prerequisite is that the administrator is logged in and is tricked into performing the action.
Relevant Code Location:
- The missing nonce validation is in
includes/display-role-admin.php(see reference).
Attack Flow:
- Attacker creates a user account with a pending role request.
- Attacker crafts a CSRF payload that submits an approval request for their account.
- The attacker lures an administrator to a malicious page or link while the admin is logged in.
- The forged request is executed in the context of the administrator, resulting in the attacker's account being approved with elevated privileges.
Patch Information
The developers of the WooCommerce Simple Registration plugin have addressed the Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability by implementing a nonce verification mechanism in the role request approval process. This security measure ensures that any request to approve a user's role change is legitimate and originates from an authorized source.
In the updated code, a nonce field is added to the approval form:
<input type="hidden" name="_wpnonce" value="<?php echo wp_create_nonce('approve_role_request'); ?>">
When processing the approval request, the plugin now verifies the nonce:
if (!isset($_POST['_wpnonce']) || !wp_verify_nonce($_POST['_wpnonce'], 'approve_role_request')) { wp_die(__('Security check failed', 'woocommerce-simple-registration')); }
By incorporating this nonce verification, the plugin effectively mitigates the risk of unauthorized role approvals through CSRF attacks. This update enhances the overall security of the plugin by ensuring that only legitimate requests can modify user roles.
Patch source: https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/3383124
Affected Systems and Versions
- Product: Simple Registration for WooCommerce (WordPress plugin)
- Affected versions: All versions up to and including 1.5.8
- Secure version: 1.5.9 and later
- Any WordPress site with the plugin installed and activated in the affected version range is vulnerable, regardless of other configuration.
Vendor Security History
Astoundify, the developer of Simple Registration for WooCommerce, has addressed multiple vulnerabilities in recent plugin versions. Version 1.5.7 (April 2024) fixed a privilege escalation issue, and version 1.5.8 (January 2025) included a security update for another unspecified vulnerability. The recurrence of privilege escalation and CSRF issues in recent releases suggests a need for improved security review and testing processes. Patch response times appear prompt once vulnerabilities are reported, but changelogs often lack detailed disclosure, which may delay awareness among users.
