Executive brief
The Student Management System stores user passwords as plain text in its database and displays them on dashboard pages without any encryption or hashing. This means that if an attacker gains access to the database or can view a user's dashboard, they can recover passwords and use them to impersonate students, teachers, or administrators. The vulnerability is particularly dangerous if users reuse these passwords across other systems.
Technical details
The vulnerability is a cleartext storage of sensitive information issue in the password handling component. Root cause: the application stores passwords in a varchar(20) field without hashing, and the login logic performs direct string comparison (if $row['password'] == $_POST['password']) rather than using password_verify(). The affected component is the aca.sql schema and login/dashboard PHP files. Attack vector is network-accessible; an attacker can exploit database disclosure, IDOR vulnerabilities, or dashboard access to retrieve cleartext passwords. Additionally, passwords are rendered directly into HTML password input fields in the dashboard (value="<?php echo $row['password'] ?>"), making them visible in page source and browser history. No patch is currently available for this rolling-release project.
Affected products
- sambitraj Student Management System up to commit 56ba287f2e9031523ccb4244cb6e3fe530e4e5d5
Timeline
- 2026-07-17: disclosed: GitHub issue #9 opened
- 2026-08-31: advisory: Published to NVD