The Patching Friars' AlmanacA calendar of CVE saints

February 20

GhostcatHoly card for ghostcat, generated with AI (Claude, Anthropic) for the Lunario dei Frati Patchatori.CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 8009 Ghostcat FELIS SPECTRALIS
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Saint Ghostcat, the Phantom Cat of Tomcat

Patron of AJP connectors left switched on, Java servers, and ports nobody remembers opening.

Life

On 20 February 2020 researchers at Chaitin Tech announced CVE-2020-1938 in Apache Tomcat. The AJP connector, enabled by default on every interface, trusted whoever spoke to it too much: an attacker could read the web application's files, configuration included, and under some conditions get code executed. It hit every major Tomcat version then in use, and ended up in CISA's catalogue of exploited vulnerabilities.

Prayer

O Saint Ghostcat, who prowls silently on port 8009, keep our connectors off when nobody uses them. Amen.

How to celebrate

Celebrated by upgrading Tomcat to 9.0.31, 8.5.51 or 7.0.100 and disabling AJP, or at least giving it a secret.

A ghost cat never meows, but the pantry still ends up empty.

Technical record

Disclosed on
February 20 2020
CVE
CVE-2020-1938
CVSS
9.8Actively exploited (CISA KEV)
Product
Apache · Apache Tomcat

When using the Apache JServ Protocol (AJP), care must be taken when trusting incoming connections to Apache Tomcat. Tomcat treats AJP connections as having higher trust than, for example, a similar HTTP connection. If such connections are available to an attacker, they can be exploited in ways that may be surprising. In Apache Tomcat 9.0.0.M1 to 9.0.0.30, 8.5.0 to 8.5.50 and 7.0.0 to 7.0.99, Tomcat shipped with an AJP Connector enabled by default that listened on all configured IP addresses. It was expected (and recommended in the security guide) that this Connector would be disabled if not required. This vulnerability report identified a mechanism that allowed: - returning arbitrary files from anywhere in the web application - processing any file in the web application as a JSP Further, if the web application allowed file upload and stored those files within the web application (or the attacker was able to control the content of the web application by some other means) then this, along with the ability to process a file as a JSP, made remote code execution possible. It is important to note that mitigation is only required if an AJP port is accessible to untrusted users. Users wishing to take a defence-in-depth approach and block the vector that permits returning arbitrary files and execution as JSP may upgrade to Apache Tomcat 9.0.31, 8.5.51 or 7.0.100 or later. A number of changes were made to the default AJP Connector configuration in 9.0.31 to harden the default configuration. It is likely that users upgrading to 9.0.31, 8.5.51 or 7.0.100 or later will need to make small changes to their configurations.

Sources: chaitin.cn · web.archive.org

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