Discourse is an open source community platform. In affected versions any user can create a topic and add arbitrary custom fields to a topic. The severity of this vulnerability depends on what plugins are installed and how the plugins uses topic custom fields. For a default Discourse installation with the default plugins, this vulnerability has no impact. The problem has been patched in the latest version of Discourse. Users are advised to update to version 3.1.1 if they are on the stable branch or 3.2.0.beta2 if they are on the beta branch. Users unable to upgrade should disable any plugins that access topic custom fields.
The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.
| Name | Vendor | Start Version | End Version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discourse | Discourse | * | 3.1.1 (including) |
| Discourse | Discourse | 3.2.0-beta1 (including) | 3.2.0-beta1 (including) |
There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:
Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:
Information exposures can occur in different ways:
It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.