Vulnerabilities > CVE-2021-43827 - Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions vulnerability in Discourse Footnote 0.1

047910
CVSS 4.0 - MEDIUM
Attack vector
NETWORK
Attack complexity
LOW
Privileges required
SINGLE
Confidentiality impact
NONE
Integrity impact
NONE
Availability impact
PARTIAL
network
low complexity
discourse
CWE-755

Summary

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.

Vulnerable Configurations

Part Description Count
Application
Discourse
1