[CVE-2008-1232] Apache Tomcat XSS vulnerability

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CVE-2008-1232: Apache Tomcat XSS vulnerability

Severity: Low

Vendor:
The Apache Software Foundation

Versions Affected:
Tomcat 4.1.0 to 4.1.37
Tomcat 5.5.0 to 5.5.26
Tomcat 6.0.0 to 6.0.16
The unsupported Tomcat 3.x, 4.0.x and 5.0.x versions may be also affected

Description:
The message argument of HttpServletResponse.sendError() call is not only
displayed on the error page, but is also used for the reason-phrase of HTTP
response. This may include characters that are illegal in HTTP headers. It
is possible for a specially crafted message to result in arbitrary content
being injected into the HTTP response. For a successful XSS attack,
unfiltered user supplied data must be included in the message argument.

Mitigation:
6.0.x users should upgrade to 6.0.18
5.5.x users should obtain the latest source from svn or apply this patch
which will be included from 5.5.27
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?rev=680947&view=rev

4.1.x users should obtain the latest source from svn or apply this patch
which will be included from 4.1.38
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?rev=680947&view=rev (connector only)
http://svn.apache.org/viewvc?rev=680948&view=rev

Example:
<%@page contentType="text/html"%>
<%
~ // some unicode characters, that result in CRLF being printed
~ final String CRLF = "\u010D\u010A";

~ final String payload = CRLF + CRLF + "<script
type='text/javascript'>document.write('Hi, there!')</script><div
style='display:none'>";
~ final String message = "Authorization is required to access " + payload;
~ response.sendError(403, message);
%>

Credit:
This issue was discovered by Konstantin Kolinko.

References:
http://tomcat.apache.org/security.html

Mark Thomas
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