Overview
SQL injection vulnerabilities are one of the most dangerous threats to data-driven applications and services. This blog post will discuss the recently discovered critical vulnerability CVE-2025-41032, found in appRain Content Management Framework (CMF) 4.0.5. This vulnerability allows an attacker to manipulate the database, potentially leading to system compromise or data leakage. It affects any organization that uses appRain CMF 4.0.5 in their infrastructure, potentially putting confidential information at risk.
Vulnerability Summary
CVE ID: CVE-2025-41032
Severity: Critical (CVSS 9.8)
Attack Vector: Network
Privileges Required: None
User Interaction: None
Impact: System compromise or data leakage
Affected Products
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Product | Affected Versions
appRain | CMF 4.0.5
How the Exploit Works
The vulnerability is exploited via the ‘data%5BAdmin%5D%5Busername%5D’ parameter in the /apprain/admin/manage/add/ endpoint. By sending a specially crafted request to this endpoint, an attacker can exploit the SQL injection vulnerability to retrieve, create, update, and delete the database. This is possible because the application fails to properly sanitize user-supplied input before passing it to SQL queries.
Conceptual Example Code
The following is a conceptual example of a malicious HTTP POST request that could exploit this vulnerability:
POST /apprain/admin/manage/add/ HTTP/1.1
Host: target.example.com
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
data%5BAdmin%5D%5Busername%5D=' OR '1'='1'; --
Mitigation and Recommendations
The best way to mitigate this vulnerability is to apply the vendor’s patch as soon as it becomes available. In the meantime, organizations can use a Web Application Firewall (WAF) or an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) as temporary mitigation, ensuring that suspicious requests are detected and blocked. Additionally, it is always a good practice to validate and sanitize all user inputs and use parameterized queries or prepared statements to prevent SQL injection attacks.