The Check Point blog has posted the first part of a series from one of their vulnerability researchers about finding security vulnerabilities in the core WordPress code (and some of the results along with CVE numbers).

In this series of blog posts, Check Point vulnerability researcher Netanel Rubin tells a story in three acts – describing his long path of discovered flaws and vulnerabilities in core WordPress, leading him from a read-only ‘Subscriber’ user, through creating, editing and deleting posts, and all the way to performing SQL injection and persistent XSS attacks on 20% of the popular web.

In this first part he focuses on the concept of "identity" in a WordPress application. He focused on the "roles and capabilities" functionality to find bypass methods in operations like editing and adding new posts. As he works through his process, code is included from the WordPress core showing where the issue(s) lie and what would be needed to exploit the issue.