Vulnerabilities > CVE-2023-49099 - Improper Access Control vulnerability in Discourse

047910
CVSS 4.3 - MEDIUM
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
NONE
Confidentiality impact
LOW
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
NONE
network
low complexity
discourse
CWE-284

Summary

Discourse is a platform for community discussion. Under very specific circumstances, secure upload URLs associated with posts can be accessed by guest users even when login is required. This vulnerability has been patched in 3.2.0.beta4 and 3.1.4.

Vulnerable Configurations

Part Description Count
Application
Discourse
242

Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE)

Common Attack Pattern Enumeration and Classification (CAPEC)

  • Embedding Scripts within Scripts
    An attack of this type exploits a programs' vulnerabilities that are brought on by allowing remote hosts to execute scripts. The attacker leverages this capability to execute scripts to execute his/her own script by embedding it within other scripts that the target software is likely to execute. The attacker must have the ability to inject script into script that is likely to be executed. If this is done, then the attacker can potentially launch a variety of probes and attacks against the web server's local environment, in many cases the so-called DMZ, back end resources the web server can communicate with, and other hosts. With the proliferation of intermediaries, such as Web App Firewalls, network devices, and even printers having JVMs and Web servers, there are many locales where an attacker can inject malicious scripts. Since this attack pattern defines scripts within scripts, there are likely privileges to execute said attack on the host. Of course, these attacks are not solely limited to the server side, client side scripts like Ajax and client side JavaScript can contain malicious scripts as well. In general all that is required is for there to be sufficient privileges to execute a script, but not protected against writing.
  • Signature Spoofing by Key Theft
    An attacker obtains an authoritative or reputable signer's private signature key by theft and then uses this key to forge signatures from the original signer to mislead a victim into performing actions that benefit the attacker.