Fixed in Apache Tomcat 9.0.29

Moderate: Local Privilege Escalation CVE-2019-12418

When Tomcat is configured with the JMX Remote Lifecycle Listener, a local attacker without access to the Tomcat process or configuration files is able to manipulate the RMI registry to perform a man-in-the-middle attack to capture user names and passwords used to access the JMX interface. The attacker can then use these credentials to access the JMX interface and gain complete control over the Tomcat instance.

The JMX Remote Lifecycle Listener will be deprecated in future Tomcat releases, will be removed for Tomcat 10 and may be removed from all Tomcat releases some time after 31 December 2020.

Users should also be aware of CVE-2019-2684, a JRE vulnerability that enables this issue to be exploited remotely.

This was fixed with commit 1fc9f589.

This issue was reported to the Apache Tomcat Security Team by An Trinh of Viettel Cyber Security on 10 October 2019. The issue was made public on 18 December 2019.

Affects: 9.0.0.M1 to 9.0.28