A Demand-Side Viewpoint to Software Vulnerabilities in WordPress Plugins

Abstract: WordPress has long been the most popular content management system (CMS). This CMS powers millions and millions of websites. Although WordPress has had a particularly bad track record in terms of security, in recent years many of the well-known security risks have transmuted from the core WordPress to the numerous plugins and themes written for the CMS. Given this background, the paper analyzes known software vulnerabilities discovered from WordPress plugins. A demand-side viewpoint was used to motivate the analysis; the basic hypothesis is that plugins with large installation bases have been affected by multiple vulnerabilities. As the hypothesis also holds according to the empirical results, the paper contributes to the recent discussion about common security folklore. A few general insights are also provided about the relation between software vulnerabilities and software maintenance.