Discourse is an open-source community discussion platform. In versions 3.5.0 and below, the Discourse AI suggestion endpoints for topic “Title”, “Category”, and “Tags” allowed authenticated users to extract information about topics that they weren’t authorized to access. By modifying the “topic_id” value in API requests to the AI suggestion endpoints, users could target specific restricted topics. The AI model’s responses then disclosed information that the authenticated user couldn’t normally access. This issue is fixed in version 3.5.1. To workaround this issue, users can restrict group access to the AI helper feature through the composer_ai_helper_allowed_groups and post_ai_helper_allowed_groups site settings.
The product does not restrict or incorrectly restricts access to a resource from an unauthorized actor.
Access control involves the use of several protection mechanisms such as:
When any mechanism is not applied or otherwise fails, attackers can compromise the security of the product by gaining privileges, reading sensitive information, executing commands, evading detection, etc. There are two distinct behaviors that can introduce access control weaknesses: