1.226.  tomcat

Updated tomcat packages that fix several security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

This update has been rated as having important security impact by the Red Hat Security Response Team.

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

It was discovered that the Red Hat Security Advisory RHSA-2007:0871 did not address all possible flaws in the way Tomcat handles certain characters and character sequences in cookie values. A remote attacker could use this flaw to obtain sensitive information, such as session IDs, and then use this information for session hijacking attacks. (CVE-2007-5333)

Note: The fix for the CVE-2007-5333 flaw changes the default cookie processing behavior: with this update, version 0 cookies that contain values that must be quoted to be valid are automatically changed to version 1 cookies. To reactivate the previous, but insecure behavior, add the following entry to the "/etc/tomcat5/catalina.properties" file:

org.apache.tomcat.util.http.ServerCookie.VERSION_SWITCH=false

It was discovered that request dispatchers did not properly normalize user requests that have trailing query strings, allowing remote attackers to send specially-crafted requests that would cause an information leak. (CVE-2008-5515)

A flaw was found in the way the Tomcat AJP (Apache JServ Protocol) connector processes AJP connections. An attacker could use this flaw to send specially-crafted requests that would cause a temporary denial of service. (CVE-2009-0033)

It was discovered that the error checking methods of certain authentication classes did not have sufficient error checking, allowing remote attackers to enumerate (via brute force methods) usernames registered with applications running on Tomcat when FORM-based authentication was used. (CVE-2009-0580)

A cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw was found in the examples calendar application. With some web browsers, remote attackers could use this flaw to inject arbitrary web script or HTML via the "time" parameter. (CVE-2009-0781)

It was discovered that web applications containing their own XML parsers could replace the XML parser Tomcat uses to parse configuration files. A malicious web application running on a Tomcat instance could read or, potentially, modify the configuration and XML-based data of other web applications deployed on the same Tomcat instance. (CVE-2009-0783)

Users of Tomcat should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to resolve these issues. Tomcat must be restarted for this update to take effect.