Skip to main content

Improper Restriction of Excessive Authentication Attempts

CVE-2020-35590

Severity Medium
Score 5/10

Summary

LimitLoginAttempts.php in the limit-login-attempts-reloaded plugin before 2.17.4 for WordPress allows a bypass of (per IP address) rate limits because the X-Forwarded-For header can be forged. When the plugin is configured to accept an arbitrary header for the client source IP address, a malicious user is not limited to perform a brute force attack, because the client IP header accepts any arbitrary string. When randomizing the header input, the login count does not ever reach the maximum allowed retries.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • NONE
  • PARTIAL
  • NONE

CWE-307 - Improper Restriction of Excessive Authentication Attempts

The software does not implement sufficient measures to prevent multiple failed authentication attempts within in a short time frame, making it more susceptible to brute force attacks.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published