CVE-2021-38507
Published: 08 December 2021
Summary
CVE-2021-38507 is a medium-severity Origin Validation Error (CWE-346) vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux. Its CVSS base score is 6.5 (Medium).
Operationally, ranked in the top 32.5% of CVEs by exploit likelihood; it is not currently listed in the CISA KEV catalog.
EU & UK References
- 🇪🇺 ENISA EUVD: EUVD-2021-24959
Vulnerability details
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…
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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.
- CWE(s)
Related Threats
No named actor attribution yet. ATT&CK technique mapping in progress for this CVE.
Affected Assets
Mitigating Controls
Likely Mitigating Controls AI
Per-CVE control mapping for this CVE has not run yet; the list below is derived from the weakness types (CWEs) cited in the NVD entry.
Requires unique identification of the service before communications, addressing failures to validate the origin of the interaction.
Trusted path establishment enforces validation that the communication originates from and reaches only the intended trusted system components.
Enforces validation of the true origin of DNS responses via signatures and chain-of-trust mechanisms.
Enforces origin validation of name/address data, eliminating reliance on unverified or impersonated DNS sources.
Mandates origin validation so that only legitimate endpoints can continue the authenticated session.