Vulnerability · Published Jan 28, 2026 · Assigned by GitHub_M
CVE-2025-68934Discourse Has Denial of Service (DoS) Vulnerability in Drafts Creation Endpoint
Medium 6.5
In plain English
A medium-severity resource allocation without limits in discourse from discourse. There are no confirmed reports of exploitation so far. The chance it is exploited in the next 30 days is estimated at 0.3% (higher than 20% of all known vulnerabilities).
Official 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 (as reported)
Weakness: CWE-770 · Vector: CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:H
References
- https://github.com/discourse/discourse/security/advisories/GHSA-vwjh-vrx9-9849 x_refsource_CONFIRM