New Security Patch Fixes Critical Apache Tomcat Vulnerabilities

The latest Apache Tomcat release addresses a critical security flaw, tracked as CVE-2024-56337, which fixes incomplete mitigations for a previously identified vulnerability, CVE-2024-50379. CVE-2024-50379 is a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, for which an initial patch was issued on December 17. However, the Apache team identified that the patch alone was insufficient to secure affected systems fully.

To emphasize the need for manual configuration adjustments, the team issued CVE-2024-56337 as a distinct advisory, even though the two vulnerabilities stem from the same underlying issue.

Nature of the Vulnerability

The flaw is a time-of-check time-of-use (TOCTOU) race condition vulnerability, which affects Apache Tomcat systems with the default servlet write enabled (i.e., the readonly initialization parameter is set to false) and running on case-insensitive file systems.

Affected Versions

The vulnerability impacts the following Apache Tomcat versions:

• 11.0.0-M1 through 11.0.1
• 10.1.0-M1 through 10.1.33
• 9.0.0.M1 through 9.0.97

Recommended Updates

Users are advised to update to the latest patched versions immediately:

• Tomcat 11.0.2
• Tomcat 10.1.34
• Tomcat 9.0.98

Additional Mitigation Steps

Beyond upgrading Tomcat, specific configurations are required based on the Java version in use:

• For Java 8 or 11: Set the system property sun.io.useCanonCaches to false (default is true).
• For Java 17: Ensure sun.io.useCanonCaches, if explicitly set, is configured as false (default is already false).
• For Java 21 and later: No configuration is necessary as the property and associated cache have been removed.

Future Enhancements

The Apache team announced upcoming security improvements in Tomcat versions 11.0.3, 10.1.35, and 9.0.99. These updates will introduce stricter checks to ensure safer default configurations. Specifically:

• Tomcat will validate that sun.io.useCanonCaches is set correctly before enabling write access for the default servlet on case-insensitive file systems.
• Where feasible, Tomcat will default the sun.io.useCanonCaches property to false.

These changes aim to minimize the risk of exploitation and enforce secure configurations automatically.

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