CVE-2022-21677mediumCWE-200

CVE-2022-21677: medium-severity vulnerability in discourse

Group advanced search option may leak group and group's members visibility

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13Vexday Risk Score

No sign of exploitation. No public exploitation artifact known so far.

ssvc Trackcvss 4.3epss 1.2%
In short

Discourse's group search feature bypasses visibility restrictions, potentially exposing groups and their members that should be hidden from public users. An attacker can use advanced search options to discover restricted groups and see who belongs to them.

Technical detail

The group advanced search functionality in Discourse prior to 2.7.13 and 2.8.0.beta11 fails to enforce group visibility and membership visibility access controls. An unauthenticated or low-privileged user can leverage search parameters to enumerate restricted groups and their members, bypassing intended authorization policies (CWE-200: Information Exposure).

Summary generated and translated by AI from the official description.
Discourse is an open source discussion platform. Discourse groups can be configured with varying visibility levels for the group as well as the group members. By default, a newly created group has its visibility set to public and the group's members visibility set to public as well. However, a group's visibility and the group's members visibility can be configured such that it is restricted to logged on users, members of the group or staff users. A vulnerability has been discovered in versions prior to 2.7.13 and 2.8.0.beta11 where the group advanced search option does not respect the group's visibility and members visibility level. As such, a group with restricted visibility or members visibility can be revealed through search with the right search option. This issue is patched in `stable` version 2.7.13, `beta` version 2.8.0.beta11, and `tests-passed` version 2.8.0.beta11 versions of Discourse. There are no workarounds aside from upgrading.
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
Affected products
discourse · discourse
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