1.281.1. RHSA-2011:0335: Important security and bug fix update
Updated tomcat6 packages that fix two security issues and one bug are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having important security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.
Apache Tomcat is a servlet container for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technologies.
A denial of service flaw was found in the way certain strings were converted to Double objects. A remote attacker could use this flaw to cause Tomcat to hang via a specially-crafted HTTP request. (CVE-2010-4476)
A flaw was found in the Tomcat NIO (Non-Blocking I/O) connector. A remote attacker could use this flaw to cause a denial of service (out-of-memory condition) via a specially-crafted request containing a large NIO buffer size request value. (CVE-2011-0534)
This update also fixes the following bug:
A bug in the "tomcat6" init script prevented additional Tomcat instances from starting. As well, running "service tomcat6 start" caused configuration options applied from "/etc/sysconfig/tomcat6" to be overwritten with those from "/etc/tomcat6/tomcat6.conf". With this update, multiple instances of Tomcat run as expected. (
BZ#676922)
Users of Tomcat should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. Tomcat must be restarted for this update to take effect.
1.281.2. RHSA-2011:0791: Moderate security and bug fix update
Updated tomcat6 packages that fix three security issues and several bugs are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.
The Red Hat Security Response Team has rated this update as having moderate security impact. Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) base scores, which give detailed severity ratings, are available for each vulnerability from the CVE links in the References section.
Apache Tomcat is a servlet container for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technologies.
It was found that web applications could modify the location of the Tomcat host's work directory. As web applications deployed on Tomcat have read and write access to this directory, a malicious web application could use this flaw to trick Tomcat into giving it read and write access to an arbitrary directory on the file system. (CVE-2010-3718)
A cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw was found in the Manager application, used for managing web applications on Tomcat. If a remote attacker could trick a user who is logged into the Manager application into visiting a specially-crafted URL, the attacker could perform Manager application tasks with the privileges of the logged in user. (CVE-2010-4172)
A second cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw was found in the Manager application. A malicious web application could use this flaw to conduct an XSS attack, leading to arbitrary web script execution with the privileges of victims who are logged into and viewing Manager application web pages. (CVE-2011-0013)
This update also fixes the following bugs:
A bug in the "tomcat6" init script prevented additional Tomcat instances from starting. As well, running "service tomcat6 start" caused configuration options applied from "/etc/sysconfig/tomcat6" to be overwritten with those from "/etc/tomcat6/tomcat6.conf". With this update, multiple instances of Tomcat run as expected. (
BZ#636997)
The "/usr/share/java/" directory was missing a symbolic link to the "/usr/share/tomcat6/bin/tomcat-juli.jar" library. Because this library was mandatory for certain operations (such as running the Jasper JSP precompiler), the "build-jar-repository" command was unable to compose a valid classpath. With this update, the missing symbolic link has been added. (
BZ#661244)
Previously, the "tomcat6" init script failed to start Tomcat with a "This account is currently not available." message when Tomcat was configured to run under a user that did not have a valid shell configured as a login shell. This update modifies the init script to work correctly regardless of the daemon user's login shell. Additionally, these new tomcat6 packages now set "/sbin/nologin" as the login shell for the "tomcat" user upon installation, as recommended by deployment best practices. (
BZ#678671)
Some standard Tomcat directories were missing write permissions for the "tomcat" group, which could cause certain applications to fail with errors such as "No output folder". This update adds write permissions for the "tomcat" group to the affected directories. (
BZ#643809)
The "/usr/sbin/tomcat6" wrapper script used a hard-coded path to the "catalina.out" file, which may have caused problems (such as for logging init script output) if Tomcat was being run with a user other than "tomcat" and with CATALINA_BASE set to a directory other than the default. (
BZ#695284,
BZ#697504)
Stopping Tomcat could have resulted in traceback errors being logged to "catalina.out" when certain web applications were deployed. (
BZ#698624)
Users of Tomcat should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. Tomcat must be restarted for this update to take effect.
