Security Resilience

CVE-2023-48297

DoS in Discourse ≤ 3.1.4

Published
12 January 2024
Modified
21 November 2024
Patch / advisory
CVSS Score v3.1 8.6
Click a component to see what it means
Raw vectorCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:C/C:N/I:N/A:H
EPSS Score 0.0052 43th percentile
Risk Priority 62 floored blend · peak EPSS

CVSS and EPSS are reproduced from their sources (NVD, FIRST EPSS). Risk Priority is our own derived reading, not an NVD score.

Summary

CVE-2023-48297 is a high-severity Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) vulnerability in Discourse Discourse. Its CVSS base score is 8.6 (High).

Operationally, ranked at the 43th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.

The strongest mitigations our analysis identified map to SC-5 (Denial-of-service Protection) and SC-6 (Resource Availability) — see the control section below for these in your framework.

EU & UK References

Vulnerability Data

Discourse is a platform for community discussion. The message serializer uses the full list of expanded chat mentions (@all and @here) which can lead to a very long array of users. This issue was patched in versions 3.1.4 and beta…

more

3.2.0.beta5.

CWE(s)

Related Threats

CVEs Like This One

CVE-2023-28440Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2023-36818Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-27085Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2023-44388Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-53851Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2023-23616Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-27100Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-43789Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-24827Same product: Discourse Discourse
CVE-2024-37299Same product: Discourse Discourse

Affected Assets

discourse
discourse
3.2.0 · ≤ 3.1.4

Mitigating Controls

Mitigating Controls (NIST 800-53 r5) AI

SC-5 directly limits the effects of resource-exhaustion events that constitute uncontrolled consumption.

SC-6 enforces explicit allocation limits on resources, structurally preventing the weakness from occurring.

Process isolation confines resource consumption to separate domains, reducing blast radius without stopping the root flaw.

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

Pre-agreed severity-based prioritization and resource allocation during incident triage reduce the likelihood that an attacker-induced resource exhaustion will overwhelm the organization before corrective action is taken.

finds

Early notification of anomalous resource consumption or system malfunctions enables throttling or isolation before availability is lost.

A.8.15 Logging partial match
finds

Specifying log storage limits and rotation procedures reduces the risk that unbounded log growth will exhaust disk or memory resources and cause denial of service.

finds

Resource-utilization monitoring and alerting on bottlenecks or overloads limits the impact of denial-of-service or resource-exhaustion attacks.

blocks

A.8.20 implements network-level protections (firewalls, segmentation, protocol hardening, monitoring, authentication of systems/devices) that can limit abuse of a resource-consuming weakness but do not stop the weakness from being exploitable; the flaw remains present in the product and can still be triggered from an authorized or internal context.

blocks

Monitoring network service usage and applying controls to restrict access when necessary limits an attacker’s ability to consume excessive resources through unrestricted or unauthenticated service calls.

Hardening callouts derived

DISA STIG baselines are authored against specific weaknesses. Where this CVE cites a broad weakness class, the mapping is not asserted at that abstraction (owner ruling, 2026-09-25: grade only at Base and below), so no rule is shown here rather than a rule shown against the wrong grain.

  • No fine-grained STIG row for CWE-400, a class-level weakness. Rules are authored against its narrower children: CWE-770.

References