CVE-2022-39226: Discourse user profile location and website fields were not sufficiently length-limited

Severity: medium (CVSS 4.3 v3.1)
Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
EPSS: 1.0% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
Public exploit or detection template: none known
Published: 2022-09-29 · updated 2026-06-17
Weakness: CWE-20

Description

Discourse is an open source discussion platform. In versions prior to 2.8.9 on the `stable` branch and prior to 2.9.0.beta10 on the `beta` and `tests-passed` branches, a malicious actor can add large payloads of text into the Location and Website fields of a user profile, which causes issues for other users when loading that profile. A fix to limit the length of user input for these fields is included in version 2.8.9 on the `stable` branch and version 2.9.0.beta10 on the `beta` and `tests-passed` branches. There are no known workarounds.

Affected products

discourse: before 2.8.9; 2.9.0-beta1, 2.9.0-beta2, 2.9.0-beta3, 2.9.0-beta4, 2.9.0-beta5, 2.9.0-beta6 (+3) — fixed in 2.8.9

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: discourse 2.8.9. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

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