As we continue to work on expanding what security issues our WordPress plugin security checker tool can check for, one of the things that doing that work has lead us to take notice of is the extent that plugins are using third-party libraries that haven’t been supported in a long time. Just like a plugin that hasn’t been supported, if there has been a security vulnerability that has been discovered, it is unlikely to be fixed. That is the case with the third-party library CSSTidy, which was last updated in 2007.

One of the files in that contains a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that has been publicly disclosed for years, for example, it was disclosed in one WordPress plugin back in July of 2012. Where we ran across recently across it was in a disclosure by Ricardo Sanchez of it in the plugin AMP Toolbox. That plugin has included the file and therefore been vulnerable since the first release of the plugin, which was only in May of last year. [Read more]