CVE intelligence and bounded remediation
CVE-2024-24827 — Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion
Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion. Without a rate limit on the POST /uploads endpoint, it makes it easier for an attacker to carry out a DoS attack on the server since creating an upload can be a resource intensive process. Do note that the impact varies from site to site as various site settings like `max_image_size_kb`, `max_attachment_size_kb` and `max_image_megapixels` will determine the amount of resources used when creating an upload. The issue is patched in the latest stable, beta and tests-passed version of Discourse. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade should reduce `max_image_size_kb`, `max_attachment_size_kb` and `max_image_megapixels` as smaller uploads require less resources to process. Alternatively, `client_max_body_size` can be reduced in Nginx to prevent large uploads from reaching the server.
- Severity
- High
- CVSS
- 7.5 (3.1)
- Published
- 2024-03-15
- CISA KEV
- Not currently listed
- Ecosystem
- software/application
- Weaknesses
- CWE-400
Affected products
- discourse / discourse
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.