Ticket #3708 (closed defect (bug): wontfix)
wp_login is too "friendly" -- Information disclosure
| Reported by: |
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Owned by: |
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| Priority: | low | Milestone: | |
| Component: | Security | Version: | 2.2 |
| Severity: | trivial | Keywords: | security login has-patch |
| Cc: |
Description
While it's not exactly the end of the world, if you attempt to login with an invalid username the error message returned is actually "Invalid username." Obviously it works as intended; However, I consider this information disclosure and feel that invalid usernames and passwords should both return the same error message.
Attachments
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wp_login.diff
(961 bytes) -
added by charleshooper 5 years ago.
- "Fix" for ticket #3708
Change History
charleshooper — 5 years ago
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attachment
wp_login.diff
added
comment:3
markjaquith — 5 years ago
There are other ways to verify user names. You can reverse engineer them from the author archive URLs (e.g. http://example.com/author/mark/). I believe the consensus last time this came up was that it was trivial to figure out the user names anyway, and that it is much more user-friendly to tell them when they messed up their username, and not the password. Also, "admin" is created on install, and can't be changed using WordPress itself, so there's no hiding that.
comment:4
charleshooper — 5 years ago
- Status changed from new to closed
- Resolution set to wontfix
Good point about the author archives, I hadn't really thought about that. Guess I was just excited about submitting my first patch for Wordpress, even IF it was only to change some error messages.
But now that I've been reminded that there are many other ways to get valid Wordpress usernames (that are all quite a bit easier than brute forcing the login) it just doesn't make sense to leave this ticket hanging.
"Fix" for ticket #3708