Apache Tomcat

• Apache Tomcat 7.x vulnerabilities
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.23
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.22
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.21
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.20
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.19
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.14
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.12
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.11
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.8
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.6
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.5
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.4
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.2
• Not a vulnerability in Tomcat

This page lists all security vulnerabilities fixed in released versions of Apache Tomcat 7.x. Each vulnerability is given a security impact rating by the Apache Tomcat security team — please note that this rating may vary from platform to platform. We also list the versions of Apache Tomcat the flaw is known to affect, and where a flaw has not been verified list the version with a question mark.

Note: Vulnerabilities that are not Tomcat vulnerabilities but have either been incorrectly reported against Tomcat or where Tomcat provides a workaround are listed at the end of this page.

Please note that binary patches are never provided. If you need to apply a source code patch, use the building instructions for the Apache Tomcat version that you are using. For Tomcat 7.0 those are building.html and BUILDING.txt. Both files can be found in the webapps/docs subdirectory of a binary distributive. You may also want to review the Security Considerations page in the documentation.

If you need help on building or configuring Tomcat or other help on following the instructions to mitigate the known vulnerabilities listed here, please send your questions to the public Tomcat Users mailing list

If you have encountered an unlisted security vulnerability or other unexpected behaviour that has security impact, or if the descriptions here are incomplete, please report them privately to the Tomcat Security Team. Thank you.

Important: Denial of service CVE-2012-0022

Analysis of the recent hash collision vulnerability identified unrelated inefficiencies with Apache Tomcat's handling of large numbers of parameters and parameter values. These inefficiencies could allow an attacker, via a specially crafted request, to cause large amounts of CPU to be used which in turn could create a denial of service. The issue was addressed by modifying the Tomcat parameter handling code to efficiently process large numbers of parameters and parameter values.

This was fixed in revisions 1189899, 1190372, 1190482, 1194917, 1195225, 1195226, 1195537, 1195909, 1195944, 1195951, 1195977 and 1198641.

This was identified by the Tomcat security team on 21 October 2011 and made public on 17 January 2012.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.22

Important: Information disclosure CVE-2011-3375

For performance reasons, information parsed from a request is often cached in two places: the internal request object and the internal processor object. These objects are not recycled at exactly the same time. When certain errors occur that needed to be added to the access log, the access logging process triggers the re-population of the request object after it has been recycled. However, the request object was not recycled before being used for the next request. That lead to information leakage (e.g. remote IP address, HTTP headers) from the previous request to the next request. The issue was resolved be ensuring that the request and response objects were recycled after being re-populated to generate the necessary access log entries.

This was fixed in revision 1176592.

This was identified by the Tomcat security team on 22 September 2011 and made public on 17 January 2012.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.21

Low: Privilege Escalation CVE-2011-3376

This issue only affects environments running web applications that are not trusted (e.g. shared hosting environments). The Servlets that implement the functionality of the Manager application that ships with Apache Tomcat should only be available to Contexts (web applications) that are marked as privileged. However, this check was not being made. This allowed an untrusted web application to use the functionality of the Manager application. This could be used to obtain information on running web applications as well as deploying additional web applications.

This was fixed in revision 1176588.

This was identified by Ate Douma on 27 September 2011 and made public on 8 November 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.21

Important: Authentication bypass and information disclosure CVE-2011-3190

Apache Tomcat supports the AJP protocol which is used with reverse proxies to pass requests and associated data about the request from the reverse proxy to Tomcat. The AJP protocol is designed so that when a request includes a request body, an unsolicited AJP message is sent to Tomcat that includes the first part (or possibly all) of the request body. In certain circumstances, Tomcat did not process this message as a request body but as a new request. This permitted an attacker to have full control over the AJP message permitting authentication bypass and information disclosure. This vulnerability only occurs when all of the following are true:

• The org.apache.jk.server.JkCoyoteHandler AJP connector is not used
• POST requests are accepted
• The request body is not processed

This was fixed in revision 1162958.

This was reported publicly on 20th August 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.20

Mitigation options:

• Upgrade to Tomcat 7.0.21
• Apply the appropriate patch
• Configure both Tomcat and the reverse proxy to use a shared secret.
  (It is "requiredSecret" attribute in AJP <Connector>, "worker.workername.secret" directive for mod_jk. The mod_proxy_ajp module currently does not support shared secrets).

References:

• AJP Connector documentation (Tomcat 7.0)
• workers.properties configuration (mod_jk)

Important: Information disclosure CVE-2011-2729

Due to a bug in the capabilities code, jsvc (the service wrapper for Linux that is part of the Commons Daemon project) does not drop capabilities allowing the application to access files and directories owned by superuser. This vulnerability only occurs when all of the following are true:

• Tomcat is running on a Linux operating system
• jsvc was compiled with libcap
• -user parameter is used

Affected Tomcat versions shipped with source files for jsvc that included this vulnerability.

This was fixed in revision 1153379.

This was identified by Wilfried Weissmann on 20 July 2011 and made public on 12 August 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.19

Low: Information disclosure CVE-2011-2526

Tomcat provides support for sendfile with the HTTP NIO and HTTP APR connectors. sendfile is used automatically for content served via the DefaultServlet and deployed web applications may use it directly via setting request attributes. These request attributes were not validated. When running under a security manager, this lack of validation allowed a malicious web application to do one or more of the following that would normally be prevented by a security manager:

• return files to users that the security manager should make inaccessible
• terminate (via a crash) the JVM

Additionally, these vulnerabilities only occur when all of the following are true:

• untrusted web applications are being used
• the SecurityManager is used to limit the untrusted web applications
• the HTTP NIO or HTTP APR connector is used
• sendfile is enabled for the connector (this is the default)

This was fixed in revisions 1145383, 1145489, 1145571, 1145694 and 1146005.

This was identified by the Tomcat security team on 7 July 2011 and made public on 13 July 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.18

Note: The issues below were fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.17 but the release votes for the 7.0.17 and 7.0.18 release candidates did not pass. Therefore, although users must download 7.0.19 to obtain a version that includes a fix for these issues, versions 7.0.17 and 7.0.18 are not included in the list of affected versions.

Low: Information disclosure CVE-2011-2204

When using the MemoryUserDatabase (based on tomcat-users.xml) and creating users via JMX, an exception during the user creation process may trigger an error message in the JMX client that includes the user's password. This error message is also written to the Tomcat logs. User passwords are visible to administrators with JMX access and/or administrators with read access to the tomcat-users.xml file. Users that do not have these permissions but are able to read log files may be able to discover a user's password.

This was fixed in revision 1140070.

This was identified by Polina Genova on 14 June 2011 and made public on 27 June 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.16

Low: Information disclosure CVE-2011-2481

The re-factoring of XML validation for Tomcat 7.0.x re-introduced the vulnerability previously reported as CVE-2009-0783. This was initially reported as a memory leak. If a web application is the first web application loaded, this bugs allows that web application to potentially view and/or alter the web.xml, context.xml and tld files of other web applications deployed on the Tomcat instance.

This was first fixed in revision 1137753, but reverted in revision 1138776 and finally fixed in revision 1138788.

This was identified by the Tomcat security team on 20 June 2011 and made public on 12 August 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.16

Important: Security constraint bypass CVE-2011-1582

An error in the fixes for CVE-2011-1088/CVE-2011-1183 meant that security constraints configured via annotations were ignored on the first request to a Servlet. Subsequent requests were secured correctly.

This was fixed in revision 1100832.

This was identified by the Tomcat security team on 13 April 2011 and made public on 17 May 2011.

Affects: 7.0.12-7.0.13

Important: Information disclosure CVE-2011-1475

Changes introduced to the HTTP BIO connector to support Servlet 3.0 asynchronous requests did not fully account for HTTP pipelining. As a result, when using HTTP pipelining a range of unexpected behaviours occurred including the mixing up of responses between requests. While the mix-up in responses was only observed between requests from the same user, a mix-up of responses for requests from different users may also be possible.

This was fixed in revisions 1086349 and 1086352. (Note: HTTP pipelined requests are still likely to fail with the HTTP BIO connector but will do so in a secure manner.)

This was reported publicly on the Tomcat Bugzilla issue tracker on 22 Mar 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.11

Moderate: Multiple weaknesses in HTTP DIGEST authentication CVE-2011-1184

Note: Mitre elected to break this issue down into multiple issues and have allocated the following additional references to parts of this issue: CVE-2011-5062, CVE-2011-5063 and CVE-2011-5064. The Apache Tomcat security team will continue to treat this as a single issue using the reference CVE-2011-1184.

The implementation of HTTP DIGEST authentication was discovered to have several weaknesses:

• replay attacks were permitted
• server nonces were not checked
• client nonce counts were not checked
• qop values were not checked
• realm values were not checked
• the server secret was hard-coded to a known string

The result of these weaknesses is that DIGEST authentication was only as secure as BASIC authentication.

This was fixed in revision 1087655.

This was identified by the Tomcat security team on 16 March 2011 and made public on 26 September 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.11

Important: Security constraint bypass CVE-2011-1183

A regression in the fix for CVE-2011-1088 meant that security constraints were ignored when no login configuration was present in the web.xml and the web application was marked as meta-data complete.

This was fixed in revision 1087643.

This was identified by the Tomcat security team on 17 March 2011 and made public on 6 April 2011.

Affects: 7.0.11

Important: Security constraint bypass CVE-2011-1088

When a web application was started, ServletSecurity annotations were ignored. This meant that some areas of the application may not have been protected as expected. This was partially fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.10 and fully fixed in 7.0.11.

This was fixed in revisions 1076586, 1076587, 1077995 and 1079752.

This was reported publicly on the Tomcat users mailing list on 2 Mar 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.10

Note: The issue below was fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.7 but the release vote for the 7.0.7 release candidate did not pass. Therefore, although users must download 7.0.8 to obtain a version that includes a fix for this issue, version 7.0.7 is not included in the list of affected versions.

Important: Remote Denial Of Service CVE-2011-0534

The NIO connector expands its buffer endlessly during request line processing. That behaviour can be used for a denial of service attack using a carefully crafted request.

This was fixed in revision 1065939.

This was identified by the Tomcat security team on 27 Jan 2011 and made public on 5 Feb 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.6

Low: Cross-site scripting CVE-2011-0013

The HTML Manager interface displayed web application provided data, such as display names, without filtering. A malicious web application could trigger script execution by an administrative user when viewing the manager pages.

This was fixed in revision 1057279.

This was identified by the Tomcat security team on 12 Nov 2010 and made public on 5 Feb 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.5

Low: Cross-site scripting CVE-2010-4172

The Manager application used the user provided parameters sort and orderBy directly without filtering thereby permitting cross-site scripting. The CSRF protection, which is enabled by default, prevents an attacker from exploiting this.

This was fixed in revision 1037778.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 15 Nov 2010 and made public on 22 Nov 2010.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.4

Low: SecurityManager file permission bypass CVE-2010-3718

When running under a SecurityManager, access to the file system is limited but web applications are granted read/write permissions to the work directory. This directory is used for a variety of temporary files such as the intermediate files generated when compiling JSPs to Servlets. The location of the work directory is specified by a ServletContect attribute that is meant to be read-only to web applications. However, due to a coding error, the read-only setting was not applied. Therefore, a malicious web application may modify the attribute before Tomcat applies the file permissions. This can be used to grant read/write permissions to any area on the file system which a malicious web application may then take advantage of. This vulnerability is only applicable when hosting web applications from untrusted sources such as shared hosting environments.

This was fixed in revision 1022134.

This was discovered by the Tomcat security team on 12 Oct 2010 and made public on 5 Feb 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.3

Note: The issue below was fixed in Apache Tomcat 7.0.1 but the release vote for the 7.0.1 release candidate did not pass. Therefore, although users must download 7.0.2 to obtain a version that includes a fix for this issue, version 7.0.2 is not included in the list of affected versions.

Important: Remote Denial Of Service and Information Disclosure Vulnerability CVE-2010-2227

Several flaws in the handling of the 'Transfer-Encoding' header were found that prevented the recycling of a buffer. A remote attacker could trigger this flaw which would cause subsequent requests to fail and/or information to leak between requests. This flaw is mitigated if Tomcat is behind a reverse proxy (such as Apache httpd 2.2) as the proxy should reject the invalid transfer encoding header.

This was fixed in revision 958911.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 14 Jun 2010 and made public on 9 Jul 2010.

Affects: 7.0.0

Important: Remote Denial Of Service CVE-2010-4476

A JVM bug could cause Double conversion to hang JVM when accessing to a form based security constrained page or any page that calls javax.servlet.ServletRequest.getLocale() or javax.servlet.ServletRequest.getLocales(). A specially crafted request can be used to trigger a denial of service.

A work-around for this JVM bug was provided in revision 1066244.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 01 Feb 2011 and made public on 31 Jan 2011.

Affects: 7.0.0-7.0.6

Moderate: TLS SSL Man In The Middle CVE-2009-3555

A vulnerability exists in the TLS protocol that allows an attacker to inject arbitrary requests into an TLS stream during renegotiation.

The TLS implementation used by Tomcat varies with connector. The blocking IO (BIO) and non-blocking (NIO) connectors use the JSSE implementation provided by the JVM. The APR/native connector uses OpenSSL.

The BIO connector is vulnerable if the JSSE version used is vulnerable. To workaround this until a fix is available in JSSE, use the connector attribute allowUnsafeLegacyRenegotiation. It should be set to false (the default) to protect against this vulnerability.

The NIO connector is not vulnerable as it does not support renegotiation.

The APR/native workarounds are detailed on the APR/native connector security page.

Users should be aware that the impact of disabling renegotiation will vary with both application and client. In some circumstances disabling renegotiation may result in some clients being unable to access the application.

This was worked-around in revision 891292.

Support for the new TLS renegotiation protocol (RFC 5746) that does not have this security issue:

• For connectors using JSSE implementation provided by JVM: Added in Tomcat 7.0.8.
  Requires JRE that supports RFC 5746. For Oracle JRE that is known to be 6u22 or later.
• For connectors using APR and OpenSSL:
  TBD. See APR/native connector security page.