CVE-2021-20273 Denial of service in privoxy

What is CVE-2021-20273?

CVE-2021-20273 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Debian Debian Linux, published on 9 Mar 2021. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

A flaw was found in privoxy before 3.0.32. A crash can occur via a crafted CGI request if Privoxy is toggled off.

Weakness: CWE-20

Which versions are affected by CVE-2021-20273?

It affects 2 products.

Products include Debian Debian Linux, Privoxy Privoxy.

How do I fix CVE-2021-20273?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2021-20273 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2021-20273 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Debian Debian Linux

• CVE-2015-3306 ProFTPD Improper Access Control Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2025-49113 RoundCube Webmail Deserialization of Untrusted Data Exploited Critical 9.9
• CVE-2026-24061 GNU InetUtils Argument Injection Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2025-39682 Linux Kernel Improper Check for Unusual or Exceptional Conditions Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2024-9680 Mozilla Firefox Use-After-Free Exploited Critical 9.8

All Debian Debian Linux vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as ALPINE-CVE-2021-20273, DEBIAN-CVE-2021-20273, GHSA-4fwc-r6j4-9vgg, UBUNTU-CVE-2021-20273.