Welcome to Part 1 of the WordPress Security Research Beginner Series! If you haven’t had a chance, please review the series introduction blog post for more details on the goal of this series and what to expect. Before diving into the security features of WordPress, it's critical to understand the underlying request architecture. WordPress is a dynamic system that processes and responds to user requests in various ways, depending on the nature of the request and the context in which it's made. By understanding this request-response pattern, we can better comprehend how plugins and themes integrate into WordPress core and how to access and trigger code that may contain vulnerabilities. We hope that by providing this beginner series on WordPress vulnerability research, you’ll in turn take the knowledge you’ve gained and use it to participate in the Wordfence Bug Bounty Program, where you can earn up to $10,400 for each vulnerability reported, with the mission of helping make WordPress a more secure ecosystem. Understanding Requests in WordPress WordPress is a web application. That means, at its core, it's built to handle HTTP requests and return responses. This interaction handles everything from rendering pages to performing administrative actions in the backend. The Request Lifecycle Initial Request: Everything starts when the server receives an HTTP request. This could be a simple GET request for a page or a POST request submitting form data. WordPress Core Loading:…Read More