Denial of service via admin theme import route in Discourse

published 2023-04-18 3 y ago modified 2026-09-08 2 mo ago also BIT-discourse-2023-28440 , EUVD-2023-32128 , GHSA-vm65-pv5h-6g3w

cvss: 2.7; version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev: Not listed; not in CISA's catalog
epss: 0.7%; EPSS 0.7% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 52%
public exploits: 0; none known

Discourse is an open source platform for community discussion. In affected versions a maliciously crafted request from a Discourse administrator can lead to a long-running request and eventual timeout. This has the greatest potential impact in shared hosting environments where admins are untrusted. This issue has been addressed in versions 3.0.3 and 3.1.0.beta4. Users are advised to upgrade. There are no known workarounds for this vulnerability.

Patch / fix

fixed in 2

bitnami discourse 3.0.3
discourse discourse 3.0.3

CISA SSVC

Exploitation: none
Automatable: no
Technical impact: partial
Assessed: 21 mo ago (2025-02-06)

Exploit prediction

0.69% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 52% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by	version	score	vector
CNA	3.1	2.7	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
NVD	3.1	2.7	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
OSV	3.1	2.7	CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:H/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L

Affected packages

ecosystem	package	affected	fixed in
bitnami	discourse	<3.0.3	3.0.3

Affected products

discourse discourse

Classification

Weakness

CWE-400 Uncontrolled Resource Consumption

References

github.com /discourse/discourse/security/advisories/GHSA-vm65-pv5h-6g3w
vendor-advisory, advisory
nvd.nist.gov /vuln/detail/CVE-2023-28440
web

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.

Summary