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Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

CVE-2023-23935

Low
3.5/10

Summary

Discourse is an open-source messaging platform. In versions 3.0.1 and prior on the `stable` branch and versions 3.1.0.beta2 and prior on the `beta` and `tests-passed` branches, the count of personal messages displayed for a tag is a count of all personal messages regardless of whether the personal message is visible to a given user. As a result, any users can technically poll a sensitive tag to determine if a new personal message is created even if the user does not have access to the personal message. In the patched versions, the count of personal messages tagged with a given tag is hidden by default. To revert to the old behaviour of displaying the count of personal messages for a given tag, an admin may enable the `display_personal_messages_tag_counts` site setting.

  • LOW
  • NETWORK
  • NONE
  • UNCHANGED
  • REQUIRED
  • LOW
  • LOW
  • NONE

CWE-200 - Information Exposure

An information exposure vulnerability is categorized as an information flow (IF) weakness, which can potentially allow unauthorized access to otherwise classified information in the application, such as confidential personal information (demographics, financials, health records, etc.), business secrets, and the application's internal environment.

References

Advisory Timeline

  • Published