CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2024-21655 — Discourse is a platform for community discussion
Discourse is a platform for community discussion. For fields that are client editable, limits on sizes are not imposed. This allows a malicious actor to cause a Discourse instance to use excessive disk space and also often excessive bandwidth. The issue is patched 3.1.4 and 3.2.0.beta4.
- Severity
- Medium
- CVSS
- 4.3 (3.1)
- Published
- 2024-01-12
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400, CWE-770
Affected products
- discourse / discourse
- discourse / discourse / 3.2.0
Showing 2 representative product identities from 4 source matches. Confirm exact affected versions with the linked vendor and NVD evidence.
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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