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).

Rationale:

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

Default Value:

The default permissions of the top-level directories are 770.

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/benchmarks/11652

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: cb426788562c1e6ca90024b2bc7766bee833edb80fbc1b605ddb530859649e00