What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2023-5549: Moodle: insufficient capability checks when updating the parent of a course category

• Severity: medium (CVSS 5.3 v3.1)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.6% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2023-11-09 · updated 2026-06-17
• Weakness: CWE-284

Description

Insufficient web service capability checks made it possible to move categories a user had permission to manage, to a parent category they did not have the capability to manage.

Affected products

• Fedoraproject Extra Packages For Enterprise Linux: 7.0
• Fedoraproject Fedora: 38
• Moodle: before 3.9.24; from 3.11.0 before 3.11.17; from 4.0.0 before 4.0.11; from 4.1.0 before 4.1.6; from 4.2.0 before 4.2.3 — fixed in 3.11.17, 3.9.24, 4.0.11, 4.1.6, 4.2.3

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Moodle 3.11.17, 3.9.24, 4.0.11, 4.1.6. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• http://git.moodle.org/gw?p=moodle.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=commit&s=MDL-66730
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2243451
• https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=451590
• http://git.moodle.org/gw?p=moodle.git&a=search&h=HEAD&st=commit&s=MDL-66730
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2243451
• https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=451590

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