SOC status:Duty analyst on shift

UK Cyber Defence
VulnerabilityModified

CVE-2021-38507

The Opportunistic Encryption feature of HTTP2 (RFC 8164) allows a connection to be transparently upgraded to TLS while retaining the visual properties of an HTTP connection, including being same-origin with unencrypted connections on port 80.

MEDIUM 6.5EPSS 0.80%

Does this matter?

Lower severity and a low EPSS score (0.80%). Track it; it rarely justifies an emergency change on its own.

Description

The Opportunistic Encryption feature of HTTP2 (RFC 8164) allows a connection to be transparently upgraded to TLS while retaining the visual properties of an HTTP connection, including being same-origin with unencrypted connections on port 80. However, if a second encrypted port on the same IP address (e.g. port 8443) did not opt-in to opportunistic encryption; a network attacker could forward a connection from the browser to port 443 to port 8443, causing the browser to treat the content of port 8443 as same-origin with HTTP. This was resolved by disabling the Opportunistic Encryption feature, which had low usage. This vulnerability affects Firefox < 94, Thunderbird < 91.3, and Firefox ESR < 91.3.

CVSS 3.1
6.5 MEDIUMCVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:H/A:N
EPSS
0.80% probability · 55th percentile
CISA KEV
Not listed
Weakness
CWE-346
Affected
mozilla/firefox · mozilla/firefox esr · mozilla/thunderbird · debian/debian linux
Source
security@mozilla.org

References

Source: NVD record, EPSS from FIRST.org, KEV from CISA. Refreshed daily.