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OpenAdvisories
Low · 3.5 CVE-2023-23935 EUVD-2023-28006

Presence of restricted personal Discourse messages may be leaked if tagged with a tag

Published Mar 16, 2023 · Updated Feb 25, 2025 · Assigned by GitHub_M

Description

Discourse is an open-source messaging platform. In versions 3.0.1 and prior on the `stable` branch and versions 3.1.0.beta2 and prior on the `beta` and `tests-passed` branches, the count of personal messages displayed for a tag is a count of all personal messages regardless of whether the personal message is visible to a given user. As a result, any users can technically poll a sensitive tag to determine if a new personal message is created even if the user does not have access to the personal message.

In the patched versions, the count of personal messages tagged with a given tag is hidden by default. To revert to the old behaviour of displaying the count of personal messages for a given tag, an admin may enable the `display_personal_messages_tag_counts` site setting.

Affected products

VendorProductAffectedFixed
discourse discourse stable <= 3.0.1, beta <= 3.1.0.beta2, tests-passed <= 3.1.0.beta2 —

References