CVE-2021-43827

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

State
Published
Severity
4.3 Medium
Published
Dec 14, 2021
Updated
Aug 4, 2024
Reserved
Nov 16, 2021

Read the record on cve.org

Description

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.

Scores

CVSSScoreVectorSource
3.14.3 MediumCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:LGitHub_M

Weaknesses

  • CWE-755 Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions

Affected Products

ProductVersions
discourse-footnotediscourse
  • < 0.2Affected

References

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