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 $CATALINA_HOME/webapps deny 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/files/2506

Item Details

Category: ACCESS CONTROL

References: 800-53|AC-3, CSCv6|3.1, CSCv7|14.6

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: d4821519b1bb8d68341353d2ac9cc803d049ce661df62f502c3dc1f4b6b31f9e