CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2023-22739 — Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion

Medium CVSS 6.5

Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion. Versions prior to 3.0.1 (stable), 3.1.0.beta2 (beta), and 3.1.0.beta2 (tests-passed) are subject to Allocation of Resources Without Limits or Throttling. As there is no limit on data contained in a draft, a malicious user can create an arbitrarily large draft, forcing the instance to a crawl. This issue is patched in versions 3.0.1 (stable), 3.1.0.beta2 (beta), and 3.1.0.beta2 (tests-passed). There are no workarounds.

Severity
Medium
CVSS
6.5 (3.1)
Published
2023-01-26
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

  • discourse / discourse
  • discourse / discourse / 3.1.0

Matched remediation archetype

Resource exhaustion and denial of service

This catalog composition supplies bounded fallback guidance. Explicitly reviewed curated workflows load with the complete record below.

Check exposure

  • Identify attacker-influenced work factors including input size, nesting, compression, fan-out, regex cost, allocation, recursion, retries, and connection lifetime.
  • Map per-request and shared CPU, memory, disk, descriptor, thread, queue, and downstream-service limits.
  • Determine whether authentication, tenancy, quotas, and rate controls apply before expensive processing begins.

Remediate safely

  • Bound input size, nesting, expansion, work, concurrency, queue depth, retries, and execution time before resource-intensive processing.
  • Release resources on every success, error, cancellation, and timeout path and use backpressure instead of unbounded buffering.
  • Update affected components and add small deterministic tests that assert resource ceilings rather than exhausting a host.

Authoritative sources

Complete CVE record and remediation plan

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