(RHSA-2011:0791) Moderate: tomcat6 security and bug fix update

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.