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David Maciejak has discovered a vulnerability in Apache Tomcat, which can be exploited by malicious people to cause a DoS (Denial of Service).

The vulnerability is caused due to performance limitations of the java.io.File class, which leads to the inefficient generation of directory listing for web directories that has a large number of files. By sending multiple concurrent requests for such a directory, it is possible to prevent other users from accessing the directory and causes the server to consume a large amount of CPU resources. The vulnerability affects only the directory that is being listed. Files or applications in other web directories are not affected.

Successful exploitation requires that directory listing is enabled in a directory with a large number of files.

The vulnerability has been confirmed in Tomcat version 5.5.11 and 5.5.12 on the Windows platform, and has been reported in versions 5.5.0 through 5.5.11. Other versions may also be affected.

Note: In version 5.5.12, the server will resume normal operation after a few minutes.

Solution
The vulnerability has been partially addressed in version 5.5.12, which will resume normal operation after a few minutes.
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Provided and/or discovered by
David Maciejak

Changelog
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Deep Links
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