Case Study: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) in WordPress Plugins

[Harini180518]

This pull request submits a new secure coding case study on Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) in WordPress plugins.

The case study explains how unescaped user input leads to stored or reflected XSS, demonstrates the impact of the vulnerability, and provides secure coding recommendations using WordPress sanitization and escaping APIs. It also includes vulnerable and fixed code examples and references.

Related GitHub Proposal Issue: #17

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[abuttner]

Please try to add more detail to this case study. Ideally you can walk the reader through the vulnerable code, point out the specific line(s) where the mistake/weakness is, and then show how the developer fixed the issue by presenting the fixed code. Please see the existing case studies for examples of how this has been accomplished. The style guide should also help in understanding the level of detail desired.

[stevechristeycoley]

Automated Analysis Results of This Use Case

Thank you for providing your use case! Apologies for the form letter, but it's a pleasure to see y'all :)

With technical knowledge work such as this project, it is important to structure information as well as possible, so that it can be processed automatically.

We also want to validate our inputs ;-)

So, this report contains the results of an automated analysis of the provided use case, looking for consistency with the documented format as covered in Section 3 "Case Study Structure" of the Style Guide.

Disclaimers:

• David Wheeler may provide guidance on how to handle these reports. We're grateful that you've put in this work already, and we don't want to burden you unnecessarily 'cuz you're probably busy :)
• Our style guide was not always 100% clear (as often happens early in technical knowledge work), so this analysis attempts to automatically resolve potential inconsistencies.
• This report is provided as a convenience. There may be some errors or omissions in this report.
• We will conduct deeper analysis at a later time.

Items are prioritized from Informative, Low, Medium, to High in terms of current importance to the project.

Analyzing Presence of Markdown

• [High] does not appear to have any markdown in it (no #, at least)

Section Analysis

• [High] Expected section name missing: 'Conclusion'
• [High] Expected section name missing: 'Title'
  • Important: detailed analysis not performed for this missing section
• [High] Expected section name missing: 'Contributions'
• [High] Expected section name missing: 'References'
  • Important: detailed analysis not performed for this missing section
• [High] Expected section name missing: 'Weakness'
  • Important: detailed analysis not performed for this missing section
• [High] Expected section name missing: 'Vulnerability'
  • Important: detailed analysis not performed for this missing section
• [High] Expected section name missing: 'Prevention'
• [High] Expected section name missing: 'Software'
  • Important: detailed analysis not performed for this missing section
• [High] Expected section name missing: 'Exploit'
• [High] Expected section name missing: 'Fix'
  • Important: detailed analysis not performed for this missing section
• [High] Expected section name missing: 'Introduction'
  • Important: detailed analysis not performed for this missing section
• [High] 11 major section-name issues detected.