RHEL 6 : tomcat6 (RHSA-2011:0791)

medium Nessus Plugin ID 54601

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Synopsis

The remote Red Hat host is missing one or more security updates for tomcat6.

Description

The remote Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 host has packages installed that are affected by multiple vulnerabilities as referenced in the RHSA-2011:0791 advisory.

Apache Tomcat is a servlet container for the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages (JSP) technologies.

It was found that web applications could modify the location of the Tomcat host's work directory. As web applications deployed on Tomcat have read and write access to this directory, a malicious web application could use this flaw to trick Tomcat into giving it read and write access to an arbitrary directory on the file system. (CVE-2010-3718)

A cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw was found in the Manager application, used for managing web applications on Tomcat. If a remote attacker could trick a user who is logged into the Manager application into visiting a specially-crafted URL, the attacker could perform Manager application tasks with the privileges of the logged in user. (CVE-2010-4172)

A second cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw was found in the Manager application. A malicious web application could use this flaw to conduct an XSS attack, leading to arbitrary web script execution with the privileges of victims who are logged into and viewing Manager application web pages.
(CVE-2011-0013)

This update also fixes the following bugs:

* A bug in the tomcat6 init script prevented additional Tomcat instances from starting. As well, running service tomcat6 start caused configuration options applied from /etc/sysconfig/tomcat6 to be overwritten with those from /etc/tomcat6/tomcat6.conf. With this update, multiple instances of Tomcat run as expected. (BZ#636997)

* The /usr/share/java/ directory was missing a symbolic link to the /usr/share/tomcat6/bin/tomcat-juli.jar library. Because this library was mandatory for certain operations (such as running the Jasper JSP precompiler), the build-jar-repository command was unable to compose a valid classpath. With this update, the missing symbolic link has been added. (BZ#661244)

* Previously, the tomcat6 init script failed to start Tomcat with a This account is currently not available. message when Tomcat was configured to run under a user that did not have a valid shell configured as a login shell. This update modifies the init script to work correctly regardless of the daemon user's login shell. Additionally, these new tomcat6 packages now set /sbin/nologin as the login shell for the tomcat user upon installation, as recommended by deployment best practices. (BZ#678671)

* Some standard Tomcat directories were missing write permissions for the tomcat group, which could cause certain applications to fail with errors such as No output folder. This update adds write permissions for the tomcat group to the affected directories. (BZ#643809)

* The /usr/sbin/tomcat6 wrapper script used a hard-coded path to the catalina.out file, which may have caused problems (such as for logging init script output) if Tomcat was being run with a user other than tomcat and with CATALINA_BASE set to a directory other than the default.
(BZ#695284, BZ#697504)

* Stopping Tomcat could have resulted in traceback errors being logged to catalina.out when certain web applications were deployed. (BZ#698624)

Users of Tomcat should upgrade to these updated packages, which contain backported patches to correct these issues. Tomcat must be restarted for this update to take effect.

Tenable has extracted the preceding description block directly from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux security advisory.

Note that Nessus has not tested for these issues but has instead relied only on the application's self-reported version number.

Solution

Update the RHEL tomcat6 package based on the guidance in RHSA-2011:0791.

Plugin Details

Severity: Medium

ID: 54601

File Name: redhat-RHSA-2011-0791.nasl

Version: 1.22

Type: local

Agent: unix

Family: Red Hat Local Security Checks

Published: 5/20/2011

Updated: 4/14/2025

Supported Sensors: Frictionless Assessment AWS, Frictionless Assessment Azure, Frictionless Assessment Agent, Nessus Agent, Agentless Assessment, Continuous Assessment, Nessus

Risk Information

VPR

Risk Factor: Low

Score: 2.9

Vendor

Vendor Severity: Moderate

CVSS v2

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.3

Temporal Score: 3.6

Vector: CVSS2#AV:N/AC:M/Au:N/C:N/I:P/A:N

CVSS Score Source: CVE-2011-0013

CVSS v3

Risk Factor: Medium

Base Score: 4.3

Temporal Score: 4

Vector: CVSS:3.0/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:R/S:U/C:N/I:L/A:N

Temporal Vector: CVSS:3.0/E:F/RL:O/RC:C

Vulnerability Information

CPE: p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:tomcat6, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:tomcat6-el-2.1-api, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:tomcat6-webapps, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:tomcat6-jsp-2.1-api, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:tomcat6-docs-webapp, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:tomcat6-servlet-2.5-api, cpe:/o:redhat:enterprise_linux:6, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:tomcat6-admin-webapps, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:tomcat6-lib, p-cpe:/a:redhat:enterprise_linux:tomcat6-javadoc

Required KB Items: Host/local_checks_enabled, Host/RedHat/release, Host/RedHat/rpm-list, Host/cpu

Exploit Available: true

Exploit Ease: Exploits are available

Patch Publication Date: 5/19/2011

Vulnerability Publication Date: 11/26/2010

Exploitable With

Core Impact

Reference Information

CVE: CVE-2010-3718, CVE-2010-4172, CVE-2011-0013

BID: 45015, 46174, 46177

CWE: 79

RHSA: 2011:0791

Detections

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