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Fencer Vulns
medium 4.3

CVE-2021-43827 json

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

published 2021-12-14 4 y ago modified 2026-06-17 4 mo ago also EUVD-2021-30707

cvss
4.3
version 3.1, CNA
cisa kev
Not listed
not in CISA's catalog
epss
0.8%
EPSS 0.8% chance of exploitation in 30 days, percentile 57%
public exploits
0
none known

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.

Patch / fix

  • discourse discourse_footnote 0.2

Exploit prediction

0.83% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days, higher than 57% of all scored CVEs (FIRST EPSS, 2026-11-08).

CVSS scores

assigned by version score vector
CNA 3.1 4.3 CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:L/UI:N/S:U/C:N/I:N/A:L
NVD 2.0 4.0 AV:N/AC:L/Au:S/C:N/I:N/A:P

Affected products

  • discourse discourse-footnote

Classification

Weakness
  • CWE-755 Improper Handling of Exceptional Conditions

References

Sources

Fencer Vulns keeps one entry per vulnerability: the CVE id wins, then GHSA, and records that alias each other are merged, except that two CVEs always keep separate entries. The same data is available as JSON.