4.7 Restrict access to Tomcat web application directory

Information

The Tomcat $CATALINA_HOME/webapps directory contains web applications that are deployed through Tomcat. It is recommended that the ownership of this directory be tomcat_admin:tomcat It is also recommended that the permission on this directory eny read, write, and execute for the world ( o-rwx ) and deny write access to the group ( g-w ).

Restricting access to these directories will prevent local users from maliciously or inadvertently affecting the integrity of web applications.

Solution

Perform the following to restrict access to Tomcat webapps directory:

- Set the ownership of the $CATALINA_HOME/webapps to tomcat_admin:tomcat # chown tomcat_admin:tomcat $CATALINA_HOME/webapps
- Remove read, write, and execute permissions for the world. # chmod g-w,o-rwx $CATALINA_HOME/webapps

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/benchmarks/15137

Item Details

Category: ACCESS CONTROL, MEDIA PROTECTION

References: 800-53|AC-3, 800-53|AC-5, 800-53|AC-6, 800-53|MP-2, CSCv7|14.6

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: 43243f6951d2cd00a37cc8279a84e6bdb58a43b7341e4049449990fe6c71f4f5