(RHSA-2016:2046) Important: tomcat security update

Apache Tomcat is a servlet container for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technologies.

Security Fix(es):

• It was discovered that the Tomcat packages installed configuration file /usr/lib/tmpfiles.d/tomcat.conf writeable to the tomcat group. A member of the group or a malicious web application deployed on Tomcat could use this flaw to escalate their privileges. (CVE-2016-5425)

• It was discovered that the Tomcat packages installed certain configuration files read by the Tomcat initialization script as writeable to the tomcat group. A member of the group or a malicious web application deployed on Tomcat could use this flaw to escalate their privileges. (CVE-2016-6325)

• It was found that the expression language resolver evaluated expressions within a privileged code section. A malicious web application could use this flaw to bypass security manager protections. (CVE-2014-7810)

• It was discovered that tomcat used the value of the Proxy header from HTTP requests to initialize the HTTP_PROXY environment variable for CGI scripts, which in turn was incorrectly used by certain HTTP client implementations to configure the proxy for outgoing HTTP requests. A remote attacker could possibly use this flaw to redirect HTTP requests performed by a CGI script to an attacker-controlled proxy via a malicious HTTP request. (CVE-2016-5388)

• A session fixation flaw was found in the way Tomcat recycled the requestedSessionSSL field. If at least one web application was configured to use the SSL session ID as the HTTP session ID, an attacker could reuse a previously used session ID for further requests. (CVE-2015-5346)

Red Hat would like to thank Dawid Golunski (http://legalhackers.com) for reporting CVE-2016-5425 and Scott Geary (VendHQ) for reporting CVE-2016-5388. The CVE-2016-6325 issue was discovered by Red Hat Product Security.