CVE-2023-45806 Discourse vulnerable to DoS via Regexp Injection in Full Name
An attacker can cause a denial of service by exploiting a regular expression injection vulnerability in the full name field, leading to excessive duplicate content generation.
- Exploited in the wild
- Not known
- Login needed
- Any signed-in user
- Attackable
- Over the internet
- Victim action needed
- Not needed
- Fix
- Available
What is CVE-2023-45806?
CVE-2023-45806 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Discourse Discourse, published on 10 Nov 2023. Any signed-in user can exploit it over the network, with no action from the victim.
Official description
Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion. Prior to version 3.1.3 of the `stable` branch and version 3.2.0.beta3 of the `beta` and `tests-passed` branches, if a user has been quoted and uses a `|` in their full name, they might be able to trigger a bug that generates a lot of duplicate content in all the posts they've been quoted by updating their full name again. Version 3.1.3 of the `stable` branch and version 3.2.0.beta3 of the `beta` and `tests-passed` branches contain a patch for this issue. No known workaround exists, although one can stop the "bleeding" by ensuring users only use alphanumeric characters in their full name field.
Weakness: CWE-1333
Which versions are affected by CVE-2023-45806?
1 open source package ship an affected version, including discourse. It affects 1 product.
| Package | Affected | Fixed in |
|---|---|---|
discourse Bitnami | All versions | 3.2.0 |
Products include Discourse Discourse.
How do I fix CVE-2023-45806?
Upgrade discourse to 3.2.0 or later.
Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.
Is CVE-2023-45806 being exploited?
There is no known exploitation of CVE-2023-45806 in the wild and no public exploit code.
Public exploit code: 1 proofs of concept on GitHub.
Other vulnerabilities in Discourse Discourse
- CVE-2021-41163 RCE via malicious SNS subscription payload
- CVE-2022-36066 Discourse vulnerable to RCE via admins uploading maliciously zipped file
- CVE-2022-39356 Discourse user account takeover via email and invite link
- CVE-2023-22468 Discourse vulnerable to Cross-site Scripting in local oneboxes
- CVE-2026-27934 Discourse leaks private topic title and post excerpt via user action API endpoint
Sources
Also known as BIT-discourse-2023-45806, GHSA-hcgf-hg2g-mw78.