Medium severity · published Dec 14, 2021
CVE-2021-43827
discourse-footnote is a library providing footnotes for posts in Discourse
4.3
CVSS
0.8%
EPSS
No
On KEV
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.
CVSS vector
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
Attack vector
Network
Complexity
Low
Privileges
Low
User interaction
None
Confidentiality
None
Integrity
None
Availability
Low
Scope
Unchanged
Exploitation
Is it being used?
Exploit prediction (EPSS)0.8% · higher than 57% of CVEs
Exploited in the wildNo evidence yet
CISA KEVNot listed
Ransomware campaign useNot known
Affected products
Which versions
DF
Discourse Footnote · Discourse
before 0.2 · source: NVD
References
NVD
https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2021-43827
CVE.org
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2021-43827
Patch
https://github.com/discourse/discourse-footnote/commit/796617e0131277011207541313522cd1946661ab
Third Party Advisory
https://github.com/discourse/discourse-footnote/security/advisories/GHSA-58vr-c56v-qr57
