CVE-2022-24804

Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion. In stable versions prior to 2.8.3 and beta versions prior 2.9.0.beta4 erroneously expose groups. When a group with restricted visibility has been used to set the permissions of a category, the name of the group is leaked to any user that is able to see the category. To workaround the problem, a site administrator can remove groups with restricted visibility from any categorys permissions setting.

Weakness

During installation, installed file permissions are set to allow anyone to modify those files.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
• Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/1.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/127.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/81.html

References

• https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/0f7b9878ff3207ce20970f0517604793920bb3d2
• https://github.com/discourse/discourse/security/advisories/GHSA-v4c9-6m9g-37ff