Apache Tomcat^®

This page lists all security vulnerabilities fixed in released versions of Apache Tomcat 5.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 Tomcat 5.0.x and 5.5.x are no longer supported. Further vulnerabilities in the 5.0.x and 5.5.x branches will not be fixed. Users should upgrade to 8.5.x or later to obtain security fixes. Vulnerabilities fixed in Tomcat 5.5.26 onwards have not been assessed to determine if they are present in the 5.0.x branch.

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 5.5 those are building.html in documentation (webapps/tomcat-docs subdirectory of a binary distributive) and BUILDING.txt file in a source distributive.

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.

• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.36
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.35
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.34
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.32
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.30
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.29
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.28
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.27
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.26
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.25, 5.0.SVN
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.24, 5.0.SVN
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.23, 5.0.SVN
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.22, 5.0.SVN
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.21, 5.0.SVN
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.21
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.18, 5.0.SVN
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.17, 5.0.SVN
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.16, 5.0.SVN
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.13, 5.0.SVN
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.7, 5.0.SVN
• Fixed in Apache Tomcat 5.5.1
• Not a vulnerability in Tomcat

Moderate: DIGEST authentication weakness CVE-2012-3439

Three weaknesses in Tomcat's implementation of DIGEST authentication were identified and resolved:

1. Tomcat tracked client rather than server nonces and nonce count.
2. When a session ID was present, authentication was bypassed.
3. The user name and password were not checked before when indicating that a nonce was stale.

These issues reduced the security of DIGEST authentication making replay attacks possible in some circumstances.

This was fixed in revision 1392248.

The first issue was reported by Tilmann Kuhn to the Tomcat security team on 19 July 2012. The second and third issues were discovered by the Tomcat security team during the resulting code review. All three issues were made public on 5 November 2012.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.35

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 1221282, 1224640 and 1228191.

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

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.34

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 1159309.

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

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.33

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 1140072.

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

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.33

Low: Information disclosure CVE-2011-2526

Tomcat provides support for sendfile with the HTTP APR connector. 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 APR connector is used
• sendfile is enabled for the connector (this is the default)

This was fixed in revision 1158244.

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

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.33

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 1159346.

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

Affects: 5.5.32-5.5.33

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 1162960.

This was reported publicly on 20th August 2011.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.33

Mitigation options:

• Upgrade to Tomcat 5.5.34.
• Apply the appropriate patch.
• Configure both Tomcat and the reverse proxy to use a shared secret.
  (It is "request.secret" attribute in AJP <Connector>, "worker.workername.secret" directive for mod_jk. The mod_proxy_ajp module currently does not support shared secrets).
• Use the org.apache.jk.server.JkCoyoteHandler (BIO) AJP connector implementation.
  (It is automatically selected if you do not have Tomcat-Native library installed. It can be also selected explicitly: <Connector protocol="org.apache.jk.server.JkCoyoteHandler">).

References:

• AJP Connector documentation (Tomcat 5.5)
• workers.properties configuration (mod_jk)

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 1057518.

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

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.31

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 1027610.

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

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.29

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 959428.

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

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.29

Low: Information disclosure in authentication headers CVE-2010-1157

The WWW-Authenticate HTTP header for BASIC and DIGEST authentication includes a realm name. If a <realm-name> element is specified for the application in web.xml it will be used. However, a <realm-name> is not specified then Tomcat will generate realm name using the code snippet request.getServerName() + ":" + request.getServerPort(). In some circumstances this can expose the local host name or IP address of the machine running Tomcat.

This was fixed in revision 936541.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 31 Dec 2009 and made public on 21 Apr 2010.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.29

Low: Arbitrary file deletion and/or alteration on deploy CVE-2009-2693

When deploying WAR files, the WAR files were not checked for directory traversal attempts. This allows an attacker to create arbitrary content outside of the web root by including entries such as ../../bin/catalina.sh in the WAR.

This was fixed in revision 902650.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 30 Jul 2009 and made public on 1 Mar 2010.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.28

Low: Insecure partial deploy after failed undeploy CVE-2009-2901

By default, Tomcat automatically deploys any directories placed in a host's appBase. This behaviour is controlled by the autoDeploy attribute of a host which defaults to true. After a failed undeploy, the remaining files will be deployed as a result of the autodeployment process. Depending on circumstances, files normally protected by one or more security constraints may be deployed without those security constraints, making them accessible without authentication. This issue only affects Windows platforms

This was fixed in revision 902650.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 30 Jul 2009 and made public on 1 Mar 2010.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.28 (Windows only)

Low: Unexpected file deletion in work directory CVE-2009-2902

When deploying WAR files, the WAR file names were not checked for directory traversal attempts. For example, deploying and undeploying ...war allows an attacker to cause the deletion of the current contents of the host's work directory which may cause problems for currently running applications.

This was fixed in revision 902650.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 30 Jul 2009 and made public on 1 Mar 2010.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.28

Low: Insecure default password CVE-2009-3548

The Windows installer defaults to a blank password for the administrative user. If this is not changed during the install process, then by default a user is created with the name admin, roles admin and manager and a blank password.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.28

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 26 Oct 2009 and made public on 9 Nov 2009.

This was fixed in revision 919006.

Important: Information Disclosure CVE-2008-5515

When using a RequestDispatcher obtained from the Request, the target path was normalised before the query string was removed. A request that included a specially crafted request parameter could be used to access content that would otherwise be protected by a security constraint or by locating it in under the WEB-INF directory.

This was fixed in revisions 782757 and 783291.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 11 Dec 2008 and made public on 8 Jun 2009.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.27

Important: Denial of Service CVE-2009-0033

If Tomcat receives a request with invalid headers via the Java AJP connector, it does not return an error and instead closes the AJP connection. In case this connector is member of a mod_jk load balancing worker, this member will be put into an error state and will be blocked from use for approximately one minute. Thus the behaviour can be used for a denial of service attack using a carefully crafted request.

This was fixed in revision 781362.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 26 Jan 2009 and made public on 3 Jun 2009.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.27

Low: Information disclosure CVE-2009-0580

Due to insufficient error checking in some authentication classes, Tomcat allows for the enumeration (brute force testing) of user names by supplying illegally URL encoded passwords. The attack is possible if FORM based authentication (j_security_check) is used with the MemoryRealm. Note that in early versions, the DataSourceRealm and JDBCRealm were also affected.

This was fixed in revision 781379.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 25 Feb 2009 and made public on 3 Jun 2009.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.27 (Memory Realm), 5.5.0-5.5.5 (DataSource and JDBC Realms)

Low: Cross-site scripting CVE-2009-0781

The calendar application in the examples web application contains an XSS flaw due to invalid HTML which renders the XSS filtering protection ineffective.

This was fixed in revision 750928.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 5 Mar 2009 and made public on 6 Mar 2009.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.27

Low: Information disclosure CVE-2009-0783

Bugs 29936 and 45933 allowed a web application to replace the XML parser used by Tomcat to process web.xml, context.xml and tld files. In limited circumstances these bugs may allow a rogue web application to view and/or alter the web.xml, context.xml and tld files of other web applications deployed on the Tomcat instance.

This was fixed in revisions 681156 and 781542.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 2 Mar 2009 and made public on 4 Jun 2009.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.27

Low: Cross-site scripting CVE-2008-1232

The message argument of HttpServletResponse.sendError() call is not only displayed on the error page, but is also used for the reason-phrase of HTTP response. This may include characters that are illegal in HTTP headers. It is possible for a specially crafted message to result in arbitrary content being injected into the HTTP response. For a successful XSS attack, unfiltered user supplied data must be included in the message argument.

This was fixed in revision 680947.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 24 Jan 2008 and made public on 1 Aug 2008.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.26

Low: Cross-site scripting CVE-2008-1947

The Host Manager web application did not escape user provided data before including it in the output. This enabled a XSS attack. This application now filters the data before use. This issue may be mitigated by logging out (closing the browser) of the application once the management tasks have been completed.

This was fixed in revision 662583.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 15 May 2008 and made public on 28 May 2008.

Affects: 5.5.9-5.5.26

Important: Information disclosure CVE-2008-2370

When using a RequestDispatcher the target path was normalised before the query string was removed. A request that included a specially crafted request parameter could be used to access content that would otherwise be protected by a security constraint or by locating it in under the WEB-INF directory.

This was fixed in revision 680949.

This was first reported to the Tomcat security team on 13 Jun 2008 and made public on 1 August 2008.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.26

Low: Session hi-jacking CVE-2007-5333

The previous fix for CVE-2007-3385 was incomplete. It did not consider the use of quotes or %5C within a cookie value.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.25

Low: Elevated privileges CVE-2007-5342

The JULI logging component allows web applications to provide their own logging configurations. The default security policy does not restrict this configuration and allows an untrusted web application to add files or overwrite existing files where the Tomcat process has the necessary file permissions to do so.

Affects: 5.5.9-5.5.25

Important: Information disclosure CVE-2007-5461

When Tomcat's WebDAV servlet is configured for use with a context and has been enabled for write, some WebDAV requests that specify an entity with a SYSTEM tag can result in the contents of arbitary files being returned to the client.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.25

Important: Data integrity CVE-2007-6286

When using the native (APR based) connector, connecting to the SSL port using netcat and then disconnecting without sending any data will cause tomcat to handle a duplicate copy of one of the recent requests.

Affects: 5.5.11-5.5.25

Low: Cross-site scripting CVE-2007-2449

JSPs within the examples web application did not escape user provided data before including it in the output. This enabled a XSS attack. These JSPs now filter the data before use. This issue may be mitigated by undeploying the examples web application. Note that it is recommended that the examples web application is not installed on a production system.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.24

Low: Cross-site scripting CVE-2007-2450

The Manager and Host Manager web applications did not escape user provided data before including it in the output. This enabled a XSS attack. These applications now filter the data before use. This issue may be mitigated by logging out (closing the browser) of the application once the management tasks have been completed.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.24

Low: Session hi-jacking CVE-2007-3382

Tomcat incorrectly treated a single quote character (') in a cookie value as a delimiter. In some circumstances this lead to the leaking of information such as session ID to an attacker.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.24

Low: Session hi-jacking CVE-2007-3385

Tomcat incorrectly handled the character sequence \" in a cookie value. In some circumstances this lead to the leaking of information such as session ID to an attacker.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.24

Low: Cross-site scripting CVE-2007-3386

The Host Manager Servlet did not filter user supplied data before display. This enabled an XSS attack.

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.24

Moderate: Cross-site scripting CVE-2007-1355

The JSP and Servlet included in the sample application within the Tomcat documentation webapp did not escape user provided data before including it in the output. This enabled a XSS attack. These pages have been simplified not to use any user provided data in the output.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.23

Important: Information disclosure CVE-2005-2090

Requests with multiple content-length headers should be rejected as invalid. When multiple components (firewalls, caches, proxies and Tomcat) process a sequence of requests where one or more requests contain multiple content-length headers and several components do not reject the request and make different decisions as to which content-length header to use an attacker can poison a web-cache, perform an XSS attack and obtain sensitive information from requests other then their own. Tomcat now returns 400 for requests with multiple content-length headers.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.22

Important: Directory traversal CVE-2007-0450

The fix for this issue was insufficient. A fix was also required in the JK connector module for httpd. See CVE-2007-1860 for further information.

Tomcat permits '\', '%2F' and '%5C' as path delimiters. When Tomcat is used behind a proxy (including, but not limited to, Apache HTTP server with mod_proxy and mod_jk) configured to only proxy some contexts, a HTTP request containing strings like "/\../" may allow attackers to work around the context restriction of the proxy, and access the non-proxied contexts.

The following Java system properties have been added to Tomcat to provide additional control of the handling of path delimiters in URLs (both options default to false):

• org.apache.tomcat.util.buf.UDecoder.ALLOW_ENCODED_SLASH: true|false
• org.apache.catalina.connector.CoyoteAdapter.ALLOW_BACKSLASH: true|false

Due to the impossibility to guarantee that all URLs are handled by Tomcat as they are in proxy servers, Tomcat should always be secured as if no proxy restricting context access was used.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.21

Low: Cross-site scripting CVE-2007-1358

Web pages that display the Accept-Language header value sent by the client are susceptible to a cross-site scripting attack if they assume the Accept-Language header value conforms to RFC 2616. Under normal circumstances this would not be possible to exploit, however older versions of Flash player were known to allow carefully crafted malicious Flash files to make requests with such custom headers. When generating the response for getLocale() and getLocales(), Tomcat now ignores values for Accept-Language headers that do not conform to RFC 2616. Applications that use the raw header values directly should not assume that the headers conform to RFC 2616 and should filter the values appropriately.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.20

Moderate: Session hi-jacking CVE-2008-0128

When using the SingleSignOn Valve via https the Cookie JSESSIONIDSSO is transmitted without the "secure" attribute, resulting in it being transmitted to any content that is - by purpose or error - requested via http from the same server.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.SVN, 5.5.0-5.5.20

Low: Information disclosure CVE-2008-4308

Bug 40771 may result in the disclosure of POSTed content from a previous request. For a vulnerability to exist, the content read from the input stream must be disclosed, eg via writing it to the response and committing the response, before the ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException occurs which will halt processing of the request.

Affects: 5.5.10-5.5.20 (5.0.x unknown)

Moderate: Cross-site scripting CVE-2006-7195

The implicit-objects.jsp in the examples webapp displayed a number of unfiltered header values. This enabled a XSS attack. These values are now filtered.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.17

Important: Information disclosure CVE-2007-1858

The default SSL configuration permitted the use of insecure cipher suites including the anonymous cipher suite. The default configuration no longer permits the use of insecure cipher suites.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.16

Low: Cross-site scripting CVE-2006-7196

The calendar application included as part of the JSP examples is susceptible to a cross-site scripting attack as it does not escape user provided data before including it in the returned page.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.15

Low: Directory listing CVE-2006-3835

This is expected behaviour when directory listings are enabled. The semicolon (;) is the separator for path parameters so inserting one before a file name changes the request into a request for a directory with a path parameter. If directory listings are enabled, a directory listing will be shown. In response to this and other directory listing issues, directory listings were changed to be disabled by default.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.12

Important: Denial of service CVE-2005-3510

The root cause is the relatively expensive calls required to generate the content for the directory listings. If directory listings are enabled, the number of files in each directory should be kept to a minimum. In response to this issue, directory listings were changed to be disabled by default. Additionally, a patch has been proposed that would improve performance, particularly for large directories, by caching directory listings.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.12

Low: Cross-site scripting CVE-2005-4838

Various JSPs included as part of the JSP examples and the Tomcat Manager are susceptible to a cross-site scripting attack as they do not escape user provided data before including it in the returned page.

Affects: 5.0.0-5.0.30, 5.5.0-5.5.6

Low: Information disclosure CVE-2008-3271

Bug 25835 can, in rare circumstances - this has only been reproduced using a debugger to force a particular processing sequence for two threads - allow a user from a non-permitted IP address to gain access to a context that is protected with a valve that extends RequestFilterValve. This includes the standard RemoteAddrValve and RemoteHostValve implementations.

Affects: 5.5.0 (5.0.x unknown)

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 1066318. This work-around is included in Tomcat 5.5.33 onwards.

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

Affects: 5.5.0-5.5.32

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, a new connector attribute allowUnsafeLegacyRenegotiation has been added to the BIO connector. 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.

A workaround was implemented in revision 904851 that provided the new allowUnsafeLegacyRenegotiation attribute. This work around is included in Tomcat 5.5.29 onwards.

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 5.5.33.
  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.

Important: Directory traversal CVE-2008-2938

Originally reported as a Tomcat vulnerability the root cause of this issue is that the JVM does not correctly decode UTF-8 encoded URLs to UTF-8. This exposes a directory traversal vulnerability when the connector uses URIEncoding="UTF-8". This directory traversal is limited to the docBase of the web application.

If a context is configured with allowLinking="true" then the directory traversal vulnerability is extended to the entire file system of the host server.

It should also be noted that setting useBodyEncodingForURI="true" has the same effect as setting URIEncoding="UTF-8" when processing requests with bodies encoded with UTF-8.

Although the root cause was quickly identified as a JVM issue and that it affected multiple JVMs from multiple vendors, it was decided to report this as a Tomcat vulnerability until such time as the JVM vendors provided updates to resolve this issue. For further information on the status of this issue for your JVM, contact your JVM vendor.

A workaround was implemented in revision 681029 that protects against this and any similar character encoding issues that may still exist in the JVM. This work around is included in Tomcat 5.5.27 onwards.

JavaMail information disclosure CVE-2005-1754

The vulnerability described is in the web application deployed on Tomcat rather than in Tomcat.

JavaMail information disclosure CVE-2005-1753

The vulnerability described is in the web application deployed on Tomcat rather than in Tomcat.