Description

Improper neutralization of input during web page generation ('cross-site scripting') vulnerability in OpenText OpenText Directory Services (OTDS) on Windows and Linux allows Cross-Site Scripting (XSS). This issue affects OpenText Directory Services (OTDS): from 25.1 through 26.2.

Executive Summary

Technical Details

Mitigations

References

Additional Metadata

{
  "score": "5.4",
  "pubDate": "2026-11-05T20:17:59.860Z",
  "pubdate": "2026-11-05T20:17:59.860Z",
  "executiveSummary": "OpenText Directory Services (OTDS) is susceptible to a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability classified as Improper Neutralization of Input During Web Page Generation.\nThis flaw allows an unauthenticated or authenticated attacker to inject arbitrary client-side scripts into web pages rendered by the application.\nThe vulnerability affects OTDS versions 25.1 through 26.2 on both Windows and Linux platforms.\nSuccessful exploitation permits an attacker to execute malicious JavaScript within the security context of the victim's browser session.\nPotential impacts include the theft of sensitive session cookies, unauthorized modification of the Document Object Model (DOM), redirection to malicious external domains, and the exfiltration of sensitive information processed by the application.\nThe risk is categorized as high for environments where users rely on OTDS for identity and access management, as the execution of malicious scripts could lead to account takeover or further compromise of integrated enterprise services.\nExploitation generally requires the attacker to trick a legitimate user into interacting with a crafted URL or malicious link containing the payload.",
  "technicalDetails": "The root cause of this vulnerability is the failure of the OTDS web application to perform adequate input sanitization and output encoding on user-supplied data before rendering it in the browser.\nThis indicates that the application likely reflects unsanitized parameters directly into the HTTP response body, allowing an attacker to inject script tags or malicious event handlers that the browser interprets as executable code rather than plain text.\nThe vulnerability specifically impacts OTDS versions ranging from 25.1 to 26.2. When a victim interacts with a specially crafted URL, the injected payload is reflected back to the user's browser, triggering execution.\nThe attack flow typically follows a structured sequence: 1. An attacker identifies a target URL parameter or HTTP request header processed by the OTDS web component that is susceptible to injection. 2. The attacker constructs a malicious payload, typically obfuscated or encoded, designed to perform a specific action, such as document.cookie exfiltration or DOM manipulation. 3. The attacker baits a victim into clicking the malicious link. 4. The victim’s browser submits the request to the OTDS server. 5. The server includes the unsanitized payload in the generated HTML response. 6. The victim’s browser receives the response and executes the injected JavaScript code due to the absence of proper Content Security Policy (CSP) headers or context-aware encoding.\nSince OTDS acts as an identity provider, a successful XSS attack provides an ideal vector for session hijacking. If the session tokens are not protected by HttpOnly flags, the script can access document.cookie and transmit the tokens to an attacker-controlled server. Furthermore, because the script runs within the domain of the OTDS application, it may bypass certain browser-based security boundaries (such as Same-Origin Policy) that might otherwise protect more sensitive authentication endpoints.\nThe vulnerability is present on both Windows and Linux deployments of the identified versions. Remediation requires an analysis of the server-side code to ensure all user input is passed through rigorous, context-aware output encoding routines (e.g., HTML entity encoding for content in standard elements, and JavaScript-specific escaping for content placed within script blocks or event handlers) prior to rendering."
}