CVE-2025-46880
📋 TL;DR
Adobe Experience Manager versions 6.5.22 and earlier contain a stored XSS vulnerability where low-privileged attackers can inject malicious scripts into form fields. When victims browse pages containing these compromised fields, their browsers execute the attacker's JavaScript. This affects organizations using vulnerable AEM instances for content management.
💻 Affected Systems
- Adobe Experience Manager
📦 What is this software?
⚠️ Risk & Real-World Impact
Worst Case
Attackers could steal session cookies, perform actions as authenticated users, deface websites, or redirect users to malicious sites, potentially leading to full account compromise and data theft.
Likely Case
Attackers with low privileges inject malicious scripts to steal session tokens or credentials from other users, enabling privilege escalation or unauthorized access to sensitive content.
If Mitigated
With proper input validation and output encoding, malicious scripts are neutralized, preventing execution and limiting impact to unsuccessful injection attempts.
🎯 Exploit Status
Exploitation requires authenticated low-privileged access; stored XSS typically has straightforward injection vectors.
🛠️ Fix & Mitigation
✅ Official Fix
Patch Version: 6.5.23 or later
Vendor Advisory: https://helpx.adobe.com/security/products/experience-manager/apsb25-48.html
Restart Required: Yes
Instructions:
1. Download AEM 6.5.23 or later from Adobe. 2. Backup current instance. 3. Apply the update following Adobe's upgrade documentation. 4. Restart the AEM service.
🔧 Temporary Workarounds
Implement Input Validation and Output Encoding
allAdd server-side validation to sanitize user input in form fields and encode output to prevent script execution.
Apply Content Security Policy (CSP)
allDeploy a strict CSP header to restrict script execution sources, mitigating XSS impact.
🧯 If You Can't Patch
- Restrict low-privileged user access to vulnerable form fields and implement web application firewall rules to block XSS payloads.
- Monitor logs for suspicious input patterns and conduct regular security audits of user-generated content.
🔍 How to Verify
Check if Vulnerable:
Check AEM version via the welcome screen or OSGi console; if version is 6.5.22 or earlier, instance is vulnerable.Check Version:
curl -k https://<aem-host>:<port>/system/console/status-productinfo | grep 'Adobe Experience Manager'Verify Fix Applied:
After patching, confirm version is 6.5.23 or later and test form fields with safe XSS payloads to ensure they are sanitized.📡 Detection & Monitoring
Log Indicators:
- Unusual POST requests to form endpoints with script tags or JavaScript payloads in parameters
- Errors from input validation failures
Network Indicators:
- HTTP requests containing malicious script patterns in user-supplied data
SIEM Query:
source="aem_access.log" AND ("<script>" OR "javascript:" OR "onerror=" OR "onload=")