Overview
The cybersecurity landscape is ever-evolving, with new vulnerabilities emerging regularly. One such vulnerability that has recently been identified and is worth discussing is CVE-2025-53583. This vulnerability pertains to the deserialization of untrusted data in emarket-design’s Employee Spotlight product. In essence, this vulnerability allows for Object Injection, posing a significant risk to users of the product.
This vulnerability impacts versions of Employee Spotlight up to and including 5.1.1. It’s a concern because it carries the potential for a system compromise or data leakage, which could have severe consequences for organizations using the software. The gravity of the situation is reflected in its CVSS Severity Score of 8.1, indicating a high level of severity.
Vulnerability Summary
CVE ID: CVE-2025-53583
Severity: High (CVSS: 8.1)
Attack Vector: Network
Privileges Required: Low
User Interaction: None
Impact: System compromise or data leakage
Affected Products
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Product | Affected Versions
Employee Spotlight | up to and including 5.1.1
How the Exploit Works
The vulnerability pertains to the deserialization of untrusted data, which is a common issue in web applications. In this case, untrusted data is not properly validated by the Employee Spotlight software. An attacker can exploit this by sending malicious serialized objects to the application, which then deserializes it, leading to an Object Injection.
Object Injection can result in various attacks, such as code execution, SQL Injection, Path Traversal, and Denial of Service, depending on the context. In this case, it could lead to system compromise or data leakage.
Conceptual Example Code
Here is a conceptual example of how this vulnerability might be exploited. This is a sample HTTP request that an attacker could send to a vulnerable endpoint:
POST /EmployeeSpotlight/api/items HTTP/1.1
Host: vulnerableserver.com
Content-Type: application/json
{ "serializedObject": "rO0ABXNyAC5qYXZhLnV0aWwuSGFzaE1hcAUH2sHDFmDRAwACRgAKbG9hZEZhY3RvckkACXRocmVzaG9sZHhwP0AAAAAAAAx3CAAAABAAAAAAeHIAJmtvcm5lLnNlcnZlci5Db21tYW5kSW5qZWN0aW9uQXR0YWNrAHzl5Z6pi4ACAARMAANjbWR0ABJMamF2YS9sYW5nL1N0cmluZzt4cHQACG5ldHN0YXQuZXhl" }Note that the “serializedObject” in the payload is a Base64 encoded serialized Java object that represents a malicious command. The actual content of this object would be crafted by the attacker to exploit the deserialization vulnerability.
