CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2023-44388 — Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion
Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion. A malicious request can cause production log files to quickly fill up and thus result in the server running out of disk space. This problem has been patched in the 3.1.1 stable and 3.2.0.beta2 versions of Discourse. It is possible to temporarily work around this problem by reducing the `client_max_body_size nginx directive`. `client_max_body_size` will limit the size of uploads that can be uploaded directly to the server.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2023-10-16
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400
Affected products
- discourse / discourse
- discourse / discourse / 3.2.0
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
The detailed catalog view below loads this exact record, its source evidence, and the full seven-phase agentic change plan.