What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities
CVE-2025-68934: Discourse Has Denial of Service (DoS) Vulnerability in Drafts Creation Endpoint
- Severity: medium (CVSS 6.5 v3.1)
- Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
- EPSS: 0.3% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
- Public exploit or detection template: none known
- Published: 2026-01-28 · updated 2026-06-17
- Weakness: CWE-770
Description
Discourse is an open source discussion platform. In versions prior to 3.5.4, 2025.11.2, 2025.12.1, and 2026.1.0, authenticated users can submit crafted payloads to /drafts.json that cause O(n^2) processing in Base62.decode, tying up workers for 35-60 seconds per request. This affects all users as the shared worker pool becomes exhausted. This issue is patched in versions 3.5.4, 2025.11.2, 2025.12.1, and 2026.1.0. Lowering the max_draft_length site setting reduces attack surface but does not fully mitigate the issue, as payloads under the limit can still trigger the slow code path.
Affected products
- discourse: before 3.5.4; from 2025.11.0 before 2025.11.2; 2025.12.0, 2026.1.0 — fixed in 2025.11.2, 3.5.4
How to fix
Upgrade to a fixed version: discourse 2025.11.2, 3.5.4. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.
References
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