Discourse is an open-source community platform. A data leak vulnerability affects sites deployed between commits 10df7fdee060d44accdee7679d66d778d1136510 and 82d84af6b0efbd9fa2aeec3e91ce7be1a768511b. On login-required sites, the leak meant that some content on the sites homepage could be visible to unauthenticated users. Only login-required sites that got deployed during this timeframe are affected, roughly between April 30 2025 noon EDT and May 2 2025, noon EDT. Sites on the stable branch are unaffected. Private content on an instances homepage could be visible to unauthenticated users on login-required sites. Versions of 3.5.0.beta4 after commit 82d84af6b0efbd9fa2aeec3e91ce7be1a768511b are not vulnerable to the issue. No workarounds are available. Sites must upgrade to a non-vulnerable version of Discourse.
The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.
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.