CVE-2021-43827CWE-755

Inline footnotes wrapped in <a> tags can cause errors in discourse-footnotes

Medium · published December 14, 2021

CVSS v3.1
4.3
EPSS
1%
Percentile
57.1
In the wild
Unconfirmed
What it is

discourse-footnote is a library providing footnotes for posts in Discourse. ### Impact When posting an inline footnote wrapped in `<a>` tags (e.g. `<a>^[footnote]</a>`, the resulting rendered HTML would include a nested `<a>`, which is stripped by Nokogiri because it is not valid. This then caused a javascript error on topic pages because we were looking for an `<a>` element inside the footnote reference span and getting its ID, and because it did not exist we got a null reference error in javascript. Users are advised to update to version 0.2. As a workaround editing offending posts from the rails console or the database console for self-hosters, or disabling the plugin in the admin panel can mitigate this issue.

The record
Technical detail
CVSS v3.1
4.3 · MEDIUM
Vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
CVSS v4.0
Not supplied
EPSS
0.00829 · 57.1th percentile
Weakness
CWE-755 · Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions
Published
2021-12-14T22:20Z
EPSS history
Timeline
  • 14 DEC 22:20Z
    Inline footnotes wrapped in <a> tags can cause errors in discourse-footnotes
    cvelistv5