CVE-2022-39356 Discourse user account takeover via email and invite link

What is CVE-2022-39356?

CVE-2022-39356 is a high-severity authentication bypass vulnerability in Discourse Discourse, published on 2 Nov 2022. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, and only if a user opens a file or follows a link.

Official description

Discourse is a platform for community discussion. Users who receive an invitation link that is not scoped to a single email address can enter any non-admin user's email and gain access to their account when accepting the invitation. All users should upgrade to the latest version. A workaround is temporarily disabling invitations with `SiteSetting.max_invites_per_day = 0` or scope them to individual email addresses.

Weakness: CWE-285

Which versions are affected by CVE-2022-39356?

1 open source package ship an affected version, including discourse. It affects 1 product.

Products include Discourse Discourse.

How do I fix CVE-2022-39356?

Upgrade discourse to 2.8.10 or later.

Upgrade, and rotate credentials and sessions that may have been exposed. More about Authentication bypass.

Is CVE-2022-39356 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2022-39356 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Discourse Discourse

• CVE-2021-41163 RCE via malicious SNS subscription payload Critical 10.0
• CVE-2022-36066 Discourse vulnerable to RCE via admins uploading maliciously zipped file Critical 9.1
• CVE-2023-22468 Discourse vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting in local oneboxes High 8.8
• CVE-2026-27934 Discourse leaks private topic title and post excerpt via user action API endpoint High 8.7
• CVE-2025-48053 Discourse vulnerable to DoS via large URL payload in PM to a bot High 8.7

All Discourse Discourse vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as BIT-discourse-2022-39356, GHSA-x8w7-rwmr-w278.