Cyber Resilience

CVE-2023-25167

Discourse ≤ 3.0.1

Published
08 February 2023
Modified
21 November 2024
Patch / advisory
CVSS Score v3.1 6.5
Click a component to see what it means
Raw vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0057 44th percentile
Risk Priority 53 floored blend · peak EPSS

Summary

CVE-2023-25167 is a medium-severity Inefficient Regular Expression Complexity (CWE-1333) vulnerability in Discourse Discourse. Its CVSS base score is 6.5 (Medium).

Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Endpoint Denial of Service (T1499); ranked at the 44th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability Data

Discourse is an open source discussion platform. In affected versions a malicious user can cause a regular expression denial of service using a carefully crafted git URL. This issue is patched in the latest stable, beta and tests-passed versions of…

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Discourse. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this issue.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise Techniques

T1499 Endpoint Denial of Service Impact
Adversaries may perform Endpoint Denial of Service (DoS) attacks to degrade or block the availability of services to users.
T1499.003 Application Exhaustion Flood Impact
Adversaries may target resource intensive features of applications to cause a denial of service (DoS), denying availability to those applications.
Derived from this CVE’s CWE(s) via the direct CWE→ATT&CK cross-walk.

CVEs Like This One

CVE-2023-45806Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2023-23621Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-53851Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-37299Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-27085Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2023-23616Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-43789Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-38360Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-24827Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2023-44388Same product: Discourse Discourse

Affected Assets

discourse
discourse
3.1.0 · ≤ 3.0.1

Mitigating Controls

Mitigating Controls (NIST CSF 2.0) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→CSF cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

PR.PS-06 mostly match
prevents

Secure SDLC practices directly prevent inefficient regex via reviews, static analysis, and safe libraries.

ID.RA-01 partial match
prevents

Vulnerability identification processes can discover ReDoS issues in existing code but do not stop their introduction.

Mitigating Controls (ISO/IEC 27001:2022 Annex A) AI

Derived directly from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry via our AI-authored CWE→ISO cross-walk (authority under review) — links open the control.

finds

Security testing can detect and reject regex patterns with exponential worst-case complexity.

prevents

Secure development lifecycle mandates review of algorithmic efficiency, directly addressing ReDoS-prone regex.

prevents

Application security requirements can specify input-validation rules that limit regex complexity.

prevents

Secure architecture principles encourage avoidance of computationally expensive constructs such as catastrophic backtracking.

prevents

Secure coding standards explicitly prohibit or limit the use of inefficient regular expressions.

References