CVE intelligence and bounded remediation

CVE-2026-31283 — In Totara LMS v19.1.5 and before, the forgot password API does not implement rate limiting for the target email address

Critical CVSS 9.8

In Totara LMS v19.1.5 and before, the forgot password API does not implement rate limiting for the target email address. which can be used for an Email Bombing attack. NOTE: the Supplier's position is that the pwresettime configuration defaults to 30 minutes, the pwresettime configuration is a hard control enforced via flag PWRESET_STATUS_ALREADYSENT, and no further password-reset email messages are sent if this flag is active for a specific email address.

Severity
Critical
CVSS
9.8 (3.1)
Published
2026-04-13
CISA KEV
Not currently listed
Ecosystem
software/application
Weaknesses
CWE-770

Affected products

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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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