Vulnerability Note VU#993544

Apache Tomcat fails to properly handle cookies containing single quotes

Original Release date: 14 Aug 2007 | Last revised: 15 Aug 2007

Overview

Apache Tomcat fails to properly handle cookies that contain a single quote, which may allow session hijacking.

Description

Apache Tomcat is an implementation of the Java Servlet and JavaServer Page (JSP) technologies. Apache Tomcat incorrectly treats a single quote as a cookie delimiter. This can cause the Tomcat cookie parsing mechanism to improperly handle all of the cookies in the cookie string that follow the cookie with the single quote. According to the vendor, the following versions of Apache Tomcat are affected

    6.0.0 to 6.0.13
    5.5.0 to 5.5.24
    5.0.0 to 5.0.30
    4.1.0 to 4.1.36
    3.3 to 3.3.2

Impact

This vulnerability can increase the possibility of a session hijacking success. In the presense of a cross-site scripting vulnerability, it may allow a denial-of-service attack against a web site by preventing a client from being able to log in using cookies.

Solution

Apply an update
This vulnerability is addressed in Apache Tomcat 6.0.14. Please check the Apache Tomcat Security page for availability of fixes for this and other versions of Tomcat.

Systems Affected (Learn More)

VendorStatusDate NotifiedDate Updated
Apache TomcatAffected02 Jul 200714 Aug 2007
If you are a vendor and your product is affected, let us know.

CVSS Metrics (Learn More)

Group Score Vector
Base N/A N/A
Temporal N/A N/A
Environmental N/A N/A

References

Credit

Thanks to Tomasz Kuczynski for reporting this vulnerability.

This document was written by Will Dormann.

Other Information

  • CVE IDs: CVE-2007-3382
  • Date Public: 13 Aug 2007
  • Date First Published: 14 Aug 2007
  • Date Last Updated: 15 Aug 2007
  • Severity Metric: 4.61
  • Document Revision: 6

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