CVE-2023-45131 Unauthenticated access to new private chat messages in Discourse

What is CVE-2023-45131?

CVE-2023-45131 is a high-severity missing authorization vulnerability in Discourse Discourse, published on 16 Oct 2023. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion. New chat messages can be read by making an unauthenticated POST request to MessageBus. This issue is patched in the 3.1.1 stable and 3.2.0.beta2 versions of Discourse. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Weakness: CWE-200

Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-45131?

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

Products include Discourse Discourse.

How do I fix CVE-2023-45131?

No fix has been published for CVE-2023-45131 yet. Limit exposure of the affected software until one is available.

Upgrade, and check permissions on every request on the server, not only in the interface. More about Missing authorization.

Is CVE-2023-45131 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-45131 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Public exploit code: 1 Exploit-DB entry.

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-2022-39356 Discourse user account takeover via email and invite link High 8.9
• 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

All Discourse Discourse vulnerabilities

Sources

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

Also known as BIT-discourse-2023-45131, GHSA-84gf-hhrc-9pw6.