CVE-2020-23982

Vulnerability

DesignMasterEvents Conference Management CMS version 1.0.0 contains a reflected cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the certificate.php page. The application does not sanitize user input in the search box, allowing an attacker to inject arbitrary HTML and JavaScript. The vulnerable page is certificate.php, and the attack vector is the search parameter. The vulnerability is present in version 1.0.0 as reported in [1].

Exploitation

An attacker can exploit this by crafting a malicious URL containing a payload in the search parameter of certificate.php. For example, the payload "> can be used. The attacker needs to trick a victim into clicking the crafted link, or if the application reflects input without proper validation, the payload executes in the context of the victim's browser. No authentication is required for this attack [1].

Impact

Successful exploitation allows the attacker to execute arbitrary JavaScript in the context of the victim's session. This can lead to session hijacking, defacement, or redirection to malicious sites. The attacker gains the ability to perform actions on behalf of the logged-in user if the victim is authenticated, otherwise access to the application's domain context [1].

Mitigation

As of the publication date, no official patch has been released. The vendor homepage (designmasterevents.com) may be contacted. Users should consider implementing a Web Application Firewall (WAF) rule to block XSS payloads, or sanitize user input in the certificate.php search parameter on the server side. If the application is no longer maintained, migration to an alternative solution is recommended [1].