CVE-2024-53994 Potential bypass of chat permissions in Discourse

What is CVE-2024-53994?

CVE-2024-53994 is a medium-severity missing authorization vulnerability in Discourse Discourse, published on 4 Feb 2025. 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. In affected versions users who disable chat in preferences could still be reachable in some cases. This problem has been patched in the latest version of Discourse. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade should disable the chat plugin within site settings.

Weakness: CWE-281

Which versions are affected by CVE-2024-53994?

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

Products include Discourse Discourse.

How do I fix CVE-2024-53994?

Upgrade discourse to 3.3.3 or later.

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

Is CVE-2024-53994 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2024-53994 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-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-2024-53994, GHSA-mrpw-gwj7-98r6.