CVE-2023-22489: Any Flarum user including unactivated can reply in public discussions whose first post was permanently deleted

If the first post of a discussion is permanently deleted but the discussion stays visible, any actor who can view the discussion is able to create a new reply via the REST API, no matter the reply permission or lock status.

This includes users that don't have a validated email.

Guests cannot successfully create a reply because the API will fail with a 500 error when the user ID 0 is inserted into the database. This should also be fixed to return the expected 401/403 status.

This happens because when the first post of a discussion is permanently deleted, the first_post_id attribute of the discussion becomes null which causes access control to be skipped for all new replies.

Flarum automatically makes discussions with zero comments invisible so an additional condition for this vulnerability is that the discussion must have at least one approved reply so that discussions.comment_count is still above zero after the post deletion.

Impact

This can open the discussion to uncontrolled spam or just unintentional replies if users still had their tab open before the vulnerable discussion was locked and then post a reply when they shouldn't be able to.

In combination with the email notification settings, this could also be used as a way to send unsolicited emails.

Versions between v1.3.0 and v1.6.3 are impacted.

Patches

The vulnerability has been fixed and published as flarum/core v1.6.3. All communities running Flarum should upgrade as soon as possible to v1.6.3 using:

composer update --prefer-dist --no-dev -a -W

You can then confirm you run the latest version using:

composer show flarum/core

Workarounds

If you don't delete the first posts you are not affected. A workaround can be to delete the discussion itself, or amend the database to manually set a first_post_id.

For more information

For any questions or comments on this vulnerability please visit https://discuss.flarum.org/

For support questions create a discussion at https://discuss.flarum.org/t/support.

A reminder that if you ever become aware of a security issue in Flarum, please report it to us privately by emailing security@flarum.org, and we will address it promptly.