CVE-2021-38507
Mozilla: Opportunistic Encryption in HTTP2 could be used to bypass the Same-Origin-Policy on services hosted on other ports
Severity
ImportantRed Hat Product Security
CVSS 3.0
Review impact separately from score.
Published · November 2, 2021
Updated · November 21, 2025
Description
The Mozilla Foundation Security Advisory describes this flaw as:
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.
CVSS score applicability
The CVSS score(s) listed for this vulnerability do not reflect the associated product's status, and are included for informational purposes to better understand the severity of this vulnerability.
Mitigation
No mitigation is specified in collected source.
CVSS / CWE
CVSS 3.0 · 7.5CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:H/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:H/I:H/A:H
CWE-829 · Inclusion of Functionality from Untrusted Control Sphere