Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities

Urgent: High-Severity XSS Flaw Exposes Blood Bank Management System

Overview

CVE-2025-63528 details a critical cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability identified in version 1.0 of the Blood Bank Management System. This vulnerability resides within the blooddinfo.php component and allows attackers to inject malicious JavaScript code into the error parameter. Due to inadequate input sanitization and encoding, the injected script executes in the victim’s browser when they access the vulnerable page, potentially leading to account compromise, data theft, or defacement of the application.

Technical Details

The vulnerability stems from the application’s failure to properly sanitize or encode user-supplied input passed through the error parameter in the blooddinfo.php script. An attacker can craft a malicious URL containing JavaScript code within the error parameter. When a user visits this crafted URL, the unsanitized input is rendered directly into the HTML, causing the injected JavaScript to execute within the user’s browser context.

Example of a potentially malicious URL:

http://example.com/blooddinfo.php?error=<script>alert('XSS Vulnerability!')</script>

CVSS Analysis

  • CVE ID: CVE-2025-63528
  • Published: 2025-12-01T15:15:51.650
  • Severity: HIGH
  • CVSS Score: 8.5

A CVSS score of 8.5 indicates a high severity vulnerability. This score reflects the potential for significant impact, including the ability to execute arbitrary code within the victim’s browser, potentially leading to full system compromise in some scenarios.

Possible Impact

Exploiting this XSS vulnerability can have severe consequences:

  • Account Compromise: An attacker could steal user session cookies, allowing them to impersonate the victim and gain unauthorized access to their account.
  • Data Theft: Sensitive information displayed within the application, such as blood donor data, patient records, or administrative credentials, could be exfiltrated.
  • Application Defacement: The attacker could modify the appearance of the website, display malicious content, or redirect users to phishing sites.
  • Malware Distribution: The attacker could inject code that downloads and executes malware on the victim’s machine.

Mitigation or Patch Steps

To mitigate this vulnerability, the following steps are recommended:

  • Input Sanitization: Implement robust input sanitization techniques to remove or escape any potentially malicious characters from user-supplied input before rendering it in the application. Specifically, focus on the ‘error’ parameter in `blooddinfo.php`.
  • Output Encoding: Use proper output encoding mechanisms to ensure that any data displayed in the HTML is rendered as plain text, preventing the execution of injected JavaScript code. Use HTML entity encoding for displaying data in HTML contexts.
  • Web Application Firewall (WAF): Deploy a web application firewall (WAF) to detect and block malicious requests targeting the vulnerable component. Configure the WAF to filter out common XSS attack patterns.
  • Update to Latest Version: Check for and apply any available patches or updates for the Blood Bank Management System. If no patch is available, consider implementing the above mitigations as a temporary workaround. Contact the vendor for a security fix.

References

Cybersecurity specialist and founder of Gowri Shankar Infosec - a professional blog dedicated to sharing actionable insights on cybersecurity, data protection, server administration, and compliance frameworks including SOC 2, PCI DSS, and GDPR.

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