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CVE-2014-0050: Apache Tomcat vulnerable to Denial of service attack

If you are a developer, you should always be careful when writing loops especially an endless loops [ for(;;) or while(true) ] which are coded to be stopped by an 'if' statement.

Security researchers from TrustWave have explained how an endless 'for' loop resulted in a denial of service vulnerability that could allow attackers to launch DOS attacks against websites hosted on Apache Tomcat servers.

The vulnerability(CVE-2014-0050) is located in Apache Commons FileUpload file.  The 'for' loop in the file is coded in such a way that it will be stopped by raising an exception or by returning a value. 

An attacker can send a malformed 'Content-type' header for a multipart request which could result in an infinite loop.

Multipart is often used in HTTP request for uploading files.  Values in the multipart requests are separated by a magic line called "boundary".  Boundary is a random string which will be defined in the 'content-type' header.

By sending a boundary value longer than 4091 characters and 'body' longer than 4096 characters, the 'for' loop won't be stopped by both 'if' statement.

TrustWave researchers managed to send four times a request containing more than 4091 characters in the boundary field that forces vulnerable tomcat server into an infinite loop.  As a result, the tomcat server will end up in consuming all available CPU resources until it is stopped.

Three critical vulnerabilities identified in Apache Tomcat 7 and 6


The Tomcat security team has identified three critical vulnerabilities in the Apache Tomcat , an open source web server and servlet container . The vulnerabilities affect 7 and 6 versions .

CVE-2012-4534: Denial of Service(DOS) vulnerability
When using the NIO connector with sendfile and HTTPS enabled, if a
client breaks the connection while reading the response an infinite loop
is entered leading to a denial of service. Tomcat 7.0.0 to 7.0.27 and Tomcat 6.0.0 to 6.0.35 are affected .

CVE-2012-3546 : Apache Tomcat Bypass of security constraints
When using FORM authentication it was possible to bypass the security constraint checks in the FORM authenticator by appending "/j_security_check" to the end of the URL if some other component (such as the Single-Sign-On valve) had called request.setUserPrincipal() before the call to FormAuthenticator#authenticate(). Tomcat 7.0.0 to 7.0.29 and Tomcat 6.0.0 to 6.0.35 are affected .

CVE-2012-4431 Apache Tomcat Bypass of CSRF prevention filter
The CSRF prevention filter could be bypassed if a request was made to a
protected resource without a session identifier present in the request. Tomcat 7.0.0 to 7.0.31 and Tomcat 6.0.0 to 6.0.35 are affected .

Users of affected versions are advised to upgrade their Tomcat with the latest versions.