CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2019-20043 — Wordpress Wordpress security vulnerability
In in wp-includes/rest-api/endpoints/class-wp-rest-posts-controller.php in WordPress 3.7 to 5.3.0, authenticated users who do not have the rights to publish a post are able to mark posts as sticky or unsticky via the REST API. For example, the contributor role does not have such rights, but this allowed them to bypass that. This has been patched in WordPress 5.3.1, along with all the previous WordPress versions from 3.7 to 5.3 via a minor release.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 5 (2.0)
- Published
- 2019-12-27
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- php/wordpress
- Weaknesses
- CWE-269
Affected products
- wordpress / wordpress
- debian / debian_linux / 9.0
- debian / debian_linux / 10.0
Matched remediation archetype
Privilege escalation and unsafe privilege management
This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.
Check exposure
- Map service accounts, operating-system identities, roles, capabilities, impersonation, set-user transitions, and administrative helper paths.
- Determine whether untrusted users or lower-privilege processes can reach the affected transition or modify inputs it trusts.
- Review file, socket, registry, device, job, container, and cloud-role permissions used before and after privilege changes.
Remediate safely
- Apply the supported fix and redesign privileged operations as a minimal, authenticated, allowlisted interface.
- Drop privileges before processing untrusted input, verify the drop succeeds, and remove unnecessary roles, capabilities, and write permissions.
- Validate ownership and permissions at time of use and add explicit lower-to-higher privilege boundary tests.
Authoritative sources
Complete CVE record and remediation plan
The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.