CVE-2024-53851
Published: 04 February 2025
Summary
CVE-2024-53851 is a medium-severity Uncontrolled Resource Consumption (CWE-400) vulnerability in Discourse Discourse. Its CVSS base score is 4.3 (Medium).
Operationally, exploitation aligns with the MITRE ATT&CK technique Application Exhaustion Flood (T1499.003); ranked at the 40.0th percentile by exploit likelihood (below the median); it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2024-52175
Vulnerability details
Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion. In affected versions the endpoint for generating inline oneboxes for URLs wasn't enforcing limits on the number of URLs that it accepted, allowing a malicious user to inflict denial of service…
more
on some parts of the app. This vulnerability is only exploitable by authenticated users. This issue has been patched in the latest stable, beta and tests-passed versions of Discourse. Users are advised to upgrade. Users unable to upgrade should turn off the `enable inline onebox on all domains` site setting and remove all entries from the `allowed inline onebox domains` site setting.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
MITRE ATT&CK Enterprise TechniquesAI
Why these techniques?
The vulnerability enables authenticated users to submit excessive URLs to the inline onebox endpoint without limits, causing application resource exhaustion (T1499.003) and exploitation for endpoint denial of service (T1499.004).
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Likely Mitigating Controls AI
Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.
Limiting concurrent sessions directly prevents uncontrolled resource consumption by capping the number of active sessions per user or account.
Analysis identifies uncontrolled resource consumption indicative of denial-of-service or abuse attempts.
Contingency plan testing includes resource exhaustion scenarios to verify recovery, making it harder for attackers to sustain exploits that cause uncontrolled consumption.
Updated contingency plans include current procedures to detect, contain, and recover from resource exhaustion, limiting an attacker's ability to sustain impact from uncontrolled consumption.
Alternate site allows resumption of operations if resource exhaustion at the primary site is exploited to cause unavailability.
Alternate telecommunications services enable resumption of essential functions when primary services become unavailable due to uncontrolled resource consumption.
The team can analyze and respond to resource exhaustion incidents, reducing the impact of attacks that exploit uncontrolled consumption weaknesses.
Timely maintenance support and spare parts enable rapid recovery from failures induced by uncontrolled resource consumption, shortening the impact window of denial-of-service attacks.