Security News > 2021 > June > Authentication Bypass in Adobe Experience Manager Impacts Large Organizations
Multiple large organizations were found to be impacted by an authentication bypass in Adobe Experience Manager CRX Package Manager, according to a warning from security vendor Detectify.
The Adobe Experience Manager is a content management solution used for the building of websites and mobile applications, while also allowing developers to manage marketing content and assets.
The authentication bypass, which was discovered by Detectify Crowdsource community researchers Ai Ho and Bao Bui, could be abused by attackers to access the CRX Package Manager, which is used for managing packages on the local AEM installation.
"The CRX Package Manager is accessed by bypassing authentication in Dispatcher, Adobe Experience Manager's caching and/or load balancing tool. Dispatcher checks user's access permissions for a page before delivering the cached page and is an essential part of most - if not all AEM installations. It can be bypassed by adding a lot of special characters in combination in the request: %0a;," the company said in an advisory.
Thus, an attacker able to access the CRX Package Manager could upload a malicious package and then abuse it to execute arbitrary code remotely and take over the vulnerable application.
For clarification, this issue does not impact AEM Cloud Service customers and only potentially impacts AEM on-premise or AEM as a Managed Service if default security configurations are removed.