CVE-2021-38507: Debian Linux

Medium severity, CVSS 6.5. EPSS: 0.8% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

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.

Affected products

• Debian Debian Linux: version 9.0 only; version 10.0 only; version 11.0 only
• Mozilla Firefox: before 94.0 (fixed in 94.0)
• Mozilla Firefox ESR: before 91.3.0 (fixed in 91.3.0)
• Mozilla Thunderbird: before 91.3.0 (fixed in 91.3.0)

Published 2021-12-08. Last modified 2026-06-17.