CVE-2025-3728: Simple Hotel Booking System Buffer Overflow

CVE-2025-3728 Overview

CVE-2025-3728 is a buffer overflow vulnerability in SourceCodester Simple Hotel Booking System 1.0, developed by razormist. The flaw resides in the Login function and is triggered through manipulation of the uname argument. An attacker with local access and low privileges can send a crafted input that overflows a fixed-size buffer, corrupting adjacent memory. The exploit details have been publicly disclosed, increasing the risk of opportunistic abuse. The weaknesses map to CWE-119 and CWE-120.

Critical Impact
Local attackers can trigger memory corruption in the Login function of Simple Hotel Booking System 1.0, potentially affecting confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the application.

Affected Products

Razormist Simple Hotel Booking System 1.0
CPE: cpe:2.3:a:razormist:simple_hotel_booking_system:1.0
SourceCodester distribution of the Simple Hotel Booking System

Discovery Timeline

2025-04-16 - CVE-2025-3728 published to NVD
2026-06-17 - Last updated in NVD database

Technical Details for CVE-2025-3728

Vulnerability Analysis

The vulnerability is a classic buffer overflow in the authentication path of Simple Hotel Booking System 1.0. When a user submits credentials, the Login function reads the uname argument into a fixed-length buffer without validating its length. Supplying an oversized uname value overwrites adjacent memory regions.

Because the vulnerable code path is reachable only from the local host, exploitation requires local access and low-privileged authentication. Impact is limited to the application context rather than the underlying operating system. The EPSS probability is 0.311%, indicating low expected exploitation activity in the near term.

Root Cause

The root cause is missing bounds checking on the uname input parameter before it is copied into a stack or heap buffer. This is a textbook CWE-120 buffer copy without checking size of input, combined with CWE-119 improper restriction of operations within the bounds of a memory buffer.

Attack Vector

An authenticated local attacker sends an overlong uname string to the Login function. The oversized input overflows the destination buffer, corrupting adjacent memory. Depending on memory layout and compiler protections, this can produce an application crash or memory corruption that affects application-level confidentiality and integrity. No verified public exploit code has been referenced in the advisory beyond the disclosure at the GitHub issue tracker and VulDB entry 305074.

Detection Methods for CVE-2025-3728

Indicators of Compromise

Unexpected termination or crash of the Simple Hotel Booking System process, particularly during login attempts.
Login requests where the uname field contains anomalously long strings or non-printable bytes.
Core dumps or application error logs referencing memory access violations in the Login code path.

Detection Strategies

Monitor authentication request payloads for uname values exceeding expected length limits (typical usernames rarely exceed 64 characters).
Enable application-level logging to capture failed login attempts along with source host and payload metadata.
Correlate repeated malformed login requests from the same local user account with process crash events.

Monitoring Recommendations

Track process integrity events on hosts running Simple Hotel Booking System 1.0, alerting on abnormal termination of the application binary.
Ingest web server and application logs into a centralized analytics platform and build rules for oversized authentication parameters.
Review local user activity for privilege patterns consistent with pre-exploitation reconnaissance against the vulnerable host.

How to Mitigate CVE-2025-3728

Immediate Actions Required

Restrict local access to hosts running Simple Hotel Booking System 1.0 to trusted administrators only.
Remove or isolate the application from production environments until the vendor provides a patched release.
Enforce strong authentication and account hygiene to reduce the pool of low-privileged local users able to reach the Login function.

Patch Information

At the time of publication, no official vendor patch has been referenced in the advisory. Track the VulDB submission #553627 and the SourceCodester project page for updated releases. Organizations should plan to upgrade or replace this application when a fixed version becomes available.

Workarounds

Deploy a reverse proxy or web application firewall rule that rejects login requests where the uname parameter exceeds a strict length threshold, for example 64 bytes.
Run the application under a restricted service account with minimal filesystem and system privileges to limit the blast radius of memory corruption.
Enable operating system-level exploit mitigations such as ASLR, DEP/NX, and stack canaries on the host running the application.

bash

# Example WAF/nginx rule to bound uname length before it reaches the application
location /login {
    if ($arg_uname ~* ".{65,}") {
        return 400;
    }
    proxy_pass http://simple_hotel_booking_backend;
}