CVE-2026-16635

Description

The Pronamic Pay plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in all versions up to, and including, 10.1.0 This is due to the `maybe_update_user_role()` function passing an attacker-controlled Gravity Forms field value (`$lead[$feed->user_role_field_id]`) directly into `WP_User::set_role()` without any allowlist validation, capability comparison, or permission check to constrain which roles can be assigned. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with Subscriber-level access and above, to escalate their own WordPress account to Administrator by tampering with the role field value in a form submission. Exploitation requires that an administrator has already configured a Pronamic Pay payment feed in Gravity Forms with the **Update User Role** option enabled and mapped to a form field; once that configuration is in place, no further preconditions exist to prevent an authenticated attacker from exploiting this vulnerability.

References

• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/pronamic-ideal/tags/10.1.0/packages/wp-pay-extensions/gravityforms/src/Extension.php#L144
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/pronamic-ideal/tags/10.1.0/packages/wp-pay-extensions/gravityforms/src/Extension.php#L376
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/pronamic-ideal/tags/10.1.0/packages/wp-pay-extensions/gravityforms/src/Extension.php#L379
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/pronamic-ideal/tags/10.1.0/packages/wp-pay-extensions/gravityforms/src/Extension.php#L988
• https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/3630401/pronamic-ideal/trunk/packages/wp-pay-extensions/gravityforms/src/Extension.php