VCUI-80-000151 The vCenter UI service must disable 'ALLOW_BACKSLASH'.

Information

When Tomcat is installed behind a proxy configured to only allow access to certain contexts (web applications), an HTTP request containing '/../' may allow attackers to work around the proxy restrictions using directory traversal attack methods. If 'allow_backslash' is 'true', the '' character will be permitted as a path delimiter. The default value for the setting is 'false', but Tomcat must always be configured as if no proxy restricting context access was used, and 'allow_backslash' should be set to 'false' to prevent directory-traversal-style attacks. This setting can create operability issues with noncompliant clients.

Solution

Navigate to and open:

/usr/lib/vmware-vsphere-ui/server/conf/catalina.properties

Update or remove the following line:

org.apache.catalina.connector.ALLOW_BACKSLASH=false

Restart the service with the following command:

# vmon-cli --restart vsphere-ui

See Also

https://dl.dod.cyber.mil/wp-content/uploads/stigs/zip/U_VMW_vSphere_8-0_Y24M08_STIG.zip

Item Details

Category: CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

References: 800-53|CM-6b., CAT|II, CCI|CCI-000366, Rule-ID|SV-259133r961863_rule, STIG-ID|VCUI-80-000151, Vuln-ID|V-259133

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: cb710e28fc2b6c60d83076367fbaa5a30ca1056be927a2d683b15c5847270274