# User Frontend <= 4.3.13 - Unauthenticated Privilege Escalation via Restricted Shortcode Injection

- **ID:** WPSEC-2026-1945
- **Plugin:** User Frontend – Membership, User Registration, User Profile, User Directory & Content Restriction with Frontend Post Submission (`wp-user-frontend`), https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-user-frontend/
- **Affected versions:** all versions before 4.3.14
- **Fixed in:** 4.3.14 (Update to 4.3.14 or later.)
- **Severity:** High 8.1 (CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H)
- **Weakness:** CWE-269
- **Usage among sites WPSec scans:** plugin Low, affected versions Low (as of 2026-10-29)
- **Attack surface analysis:** https://attacksurface.wpsec.com/plugin/wp-user-frontend
- **Fix released:** 2026-10-28
- **Published:** 2026-10-29
- **URL:** https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-1945/

## Description

The User Frontend plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in all versions up to, and including, 4.3.13. The restricted-shortcode check on frontend post submissions only covered rich-text fields and inspected text normalised differently from what was stored, allowing the protected [wpuf-registration] shortcode to slip through. This makes it possible for unauthenticated attackers, on forms that allow guest posting, and authenticated attackers with subscriber-level access and above, to embed the registration shortcode in a submission and use it to register a new account with a higher role such as Editor, provided user registration is enabled.

## References

- https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-1945/
- https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/wp-user-frontend/tags/4.3.14/
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-user-frontend/

Source: WPSec, https://wpsec.com/vuln/WPSEC-2026-1945/

License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). Free to use, share and adapt, also commercially, if you credit WPSec and link to this advisory.