CVE-2023-28440

Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion. In affected versions a maliciously crafted request from a Discourse administrator can lead to a long-running request and eventual timeout. This has the greatest potential impact in shared hosting environments where admins are untrusted. This issue has been addressed in versions 3.0.3 and 3.1.0.beta4. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Weakness

The product does not properly control the allocation and maintenance of a limited resource.

Affected Software

Potential Mitigations

• Mitigation of resource exhaustion attacks requires that the target system either:

• The first of these solutions is an issue in itself though, since it may allow attackers to prevent the use of the system by a particular valid user. If the attacker impersonates the valid user, they may be able to prevent the user from accessing the server in question.

• The second solution is simply difficult to effectively institute – and even when properly done, it does not provide a full solution. It simply makes the attack require more resources on the part of the attacker.

Related Attack Patterns

• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/147.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/227.html
• https://cwe.mitre.org/data/definitions/492.html

References

• https://github.com/discourse/discourse/security/advisories/GHSA-vm65-pv5h-6g3w
• https://github.com/discourse/discourse/security/advisories/GHSA-vm65-pv5h-6g3w