RHSA-2014:0686 — Security Advisory

Updated tomcat packages that fix three security issues are now available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

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.

It was found that a fix for a previous security flaw introduced a regression that could cause a denial of service in Tomcat 7. A remote attacker could use this flaw to consume an excessive amount of CPU on the Tomcat server by sending a specially crafted request to that server. (CVE-2014-0186)

It was found that when Tomcat 7 processed a series of HTTP requests in which at least one request contained either multiple content-length headers, or one content-length header with a chunked transfer-encoding header, Tomcat would incorrectly handle the request. A remote attacker could use this flaw to poison a web cache, perform cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks, or obtain sensitive information from other requests. (CVE-2013-4286)

It was discovered that the fix for CVE-2012-3544 did not properly resolve a denial of service flaw in the way Tomcat 7 processed chunk extensions and trailing headers in chunked requests. A remote attacker could use this flaw to send an excessively long request that, when processed by Tomcat, could consume network bandwidth, CPU, and memory on the Tomcat server. Note that chunked transfer encoding is enabled by default. (CVE-2013-4322)

All Tomcat 7 users are advised to upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. Tomcat must be restarted for this update to take effect.