CVE-2026-4132 Vulnerability Analysis & Exploit Details

CVE-2026-4132 Vulnerability Summary

CVE-2026-4132: The HTTP Headers plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to External Control of File Name or Path leading to Remote Code Execution in all versions up to and including 1.19.2. This is due to insufficient validation of the file path stored in the 'hh_htpasswd_path' option and lack of sanitization on the 'hh_www_authenticate_user' option value. The plugin allows administrators to set an arbitrary file path for the htpasswd file location and does not validate that the path has a safe file extension (e.g., restricting to .htpasswd). Additionally, the username field used for HTTP Basic Authentication is written directly into the file without sanitization. The apache_auth_credentials() function constructs the file content using the unsanitized username via sprintf('%s:{SHA}%s', $user, ...), and update_auth_credentials() writes this content to the attacker-controlled path via file_put_contents(). This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Administrator-level access and above, to write arbitrary content (including PHP code) to arbitrary file paths on the server, effectively achieving Remote Code Execution.

CVE-2026-4132 References

External References

• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/tags/1.19.2/http-headers.php#L1296
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/tags/1.19.2/http-headers.php#L1298
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/tags/1.19.2/http-headers.php#L1403
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/tags/1.19.2/http-headers.php#L671
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/tags/1.19.2/http-headers.php#L722
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/tags/1.19.2/http-headers.php#L97
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/trunk/http-headers.php#L1296
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/trunk/http-headers.php#L1298
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/trunk/http-headers.php#L1403
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/trunk/http-headers.php#L671
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/trunk/http-headers.php#L722
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/http-headers/trunk/http-headers.php#L97
• https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/ce010c6f-16bd-4178-a621-31ba6378946a?source=cve

CWE Common Weakness Enumeration

CAPEC Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification

• Subverting Environment Variable Values CAPEC-13 The adversary directly or indirectly modifies environment variables used by or controlling the target software. The adversary's goal is to cause the target software to deviate from its expected operation in a manner that benefits the adversary.
• Leverage Alternate Encoding CAPEC-267 An adversary leverages the possibility to encode potentially harmful input or content used by applications such that the applications are ineffective at validating this encoding standard.
• Using Slashes and URL Encoding Combined to Bypass Validation Logic CAPEC-64 This attack targets the encoding of the URL combined with the encoding of the slash characters. An attacker can take advantage of the multiple ways of encoding a URL and abuse the interpretation of the URL. A URL may contain special character that need special syntax handling in order to be interpreted. Special characters are represented using a percentage character followed by two digits representing the octet code of the original character (%HEX-CODE). For instance US-ASCII space character would be represented with %20. This is often referred as escaped ending or percent-encoding. Since the server decodes the URL from the requests, it may restrict the access to some URL paths by validating and filtering out the URL requests it received. An attacker will try to craft an URL with a sequence of special characters which once interpreted by the server will be equivalent to a forbidden URL. It can be difficult to protect against this attack since the URL can contain other format of encoding such as UTF-8 encoding, Unicode-encoding, etc.
• URL Encoding CAPEC-72 This attack targets the encoding of the URL. An adversary can take advantage of the multiple way of encoding an URL and abuse the interpretation of the URL.
• Manipulating Web Input to File System Calls CAPEC-76 An attacker manipulates inputs to the target software which the target software passes to file system calls in the OS. The goal is to gain access to, and perhaps modify, areas of the file system that the target software did not intend to be accessible.
• Using Escaped Slashes in Alternate Encoding CAPEC-78 This attack targets the use of the backslash in alternate encoding. An adversary can provide a backslash as a leading character and causes a parser to believe that the next character is special. This is called an escape. By using that trick, the adversary tries to exploit alternate ways to encode the same character which leads to filter problems and opens avenues to attack.
• Using Slashes in Alternate Encoding CAPEC-79 This attack targets the encoding of the Slash characters. An adversary would try to exploit common filtering problems related to the use of the slashes characters to gain access to resources on the target host. Directory-driven systems, such as file systems and databases, typically use the slash character to indicate traversal between directories or other container components. For murky historical reasons, PCs (and, as a result, Microsoft OSs) choose to use a backslash, whereas the UNIX world typically makes use of the forward slash. The schizophrenic result is that many MS-based systems are required to understand both forms of the slash. This gives the adversary many opportunities to discover and abuse a number of common filtering problems. The goal of this pattern is to discover server software that only applies filters to one version, but not the other.
• Using UTF-8 Encoding to Bypass Validation Logic CAPEC-80 This attack is a specific variation on leveraging alternate encodings to bypass validation logic. This attack leverages the possibility to encode potentially harmful input in UTF-8 and submit it to applications not expecting or effective at validating this encoding standard making input filtering difficult. UTF-8 (8-bit UCS/Unicode Transformation Format) is a variable-length character encoding for Unicode. Legal UTF-8 characters are one to four bytes long. However, early version of the UTF-8 specification got some entries wrong (in some cases it permitted overlong characters). UTF-8 encoders are supposed to use the "shortest possible" encoding, but naive decoders may accept encodings that are longer than necessary. According to the RFC 3629, a particularly subtle form of this attack can be carried out against a parser which performs security-critical validity checks against the UTF-8 encoded form of its input, but interprets certain illegal octet sequences as characters.

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