CVE-2025-39441 in Dashboard Notepads Plugin
Summary
by MITRE • 04/17/2025
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in swedish boy Dashboard Notepads allows Stored XSS. This issue affects Dashboard Notepads: from n/a through 1.2.1.
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Analysis
by VulDB Data Team • 04/17/2025
This vulnerability represents a critical security flaw in the swedish boy Dashboard Notepads application that demonstrates the dangerous intersection of cross-site request forgery and stored cross-site scripting vulnerabilities. The CSRF weakness allows attackers to trick authenticated users into executing unintended actions on the vulnerable system, while the stored XSS component enables persistent malicious code execution within the application's user interface. The vulnerability exists across all versions from the initial release through version 1.2.1, indicating a long-standing security gap that has not been properly addressed. This combination creates a particularly dangerous attack vector where an attacker can not only perform unauthorized actions but also inject persistent malicious scripts that will execute whenever affected users view the compromised content.
The technical implementation of this vulnerability stems from inadequate protection mechanisms for state-changing requests within the application's web interface. The CSRF protection tokens are either missing, improperly validated, or insufficiently implemented, allowing malicious actors to forge requests that appear legitimate to the server. When combined with the stored XSS capability, this creates a scenario where an attacker can inject malicious scripts into the application's storage system, which then executes whenever authenticated users access the affected pages. The vulnerability's impact is amplified because it affects the core dashboard functionality where users expect to see trusted content, making the attack more likely to succeed through social engineering or exploitation of user trust. This type of vulnerability aligns with CWE-352 which specifically addresses cross-site request forgery weaknesses, and also relates to CWE-79 which covers cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.
The operational impact of this vulnerability extends beyond simple data theft or modification, as it provides attackers with a persistent foothold within the application environment. An attacker who successfully exploits this vulnerability can execute malicious scripts that may steal session cookies, redirect users to phishing sites, modify application data, or even escalate privileges within the system. The stored nature of the XSS means that the malicious code remains active even after the initial attack, continuously affecting all users who access the compromised content. This vulnerability particularly affects the integrity and confidentiality of the application's data, as well as its availability since persistent attacks can degrade system performance or render parts of the application unusable. The vulnerability's presence across multiple versions suggests that the development team has not adequately addressed similar issues in previous releases, indicating potential systemic security weaknesses in the application's architecture.
Organizations using this application should implement immediate mitigations including the deployment of proper CSRF protection mechanisms such as anti-forgery tokens that are validated on every state-changing request. The application must also implement robust input sanitization and output encoding to prevent XSS vulnerabilities from being exploited, ensuring that any user-supplied content is properly escaped before being rendered in the browser. Additionally, implementing Content Security Policy headers can provide an additional layer of protection against malicious script execution. Regular security audits and penetration testing should be conducted to identify similar vulnerabilities in other parts of the application. The mitigation strategy should also include user education about the risks of clicking suspicious links or visiting untrusted websites that may exploit these vulnerabilities. From an ATT&CK framework perspective, this vulnerability maps to techniques involving credential access through web application attacks and privilege escalation through malicious code execution, making it a significant concern for organizations that rely on dashboard applications for critical operations.