Some vulnerabilities have been reported in Apache Tomcat, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct cross-site scripting attacks, bypass certain security restrictions, or disclose sensitive information.

1) Input passed to the "HttpServletResponse.sendError()" function is not properly sanitised before being returned to the user in the HTTP "Reason-Phrase". This can be exploited to execute arbitrary HTML and script code in a user's browser session in context of an affected site.

2) The vulnerability is caused due to the application normalising the target path before removing the query string when using a "RequestDispatcher". This can be exploited to access normally restricted files via e.g. directory traversal attacks.

3) An input validation error can be exploited to download arbitrary files via directory traversal attacks.

Successful exploitation requires that a context is configured with allowLinking="true" and that the connector is configured with URIEncoding="UTF-8".

The vulnerabilities are reported in the following versions:
* 4.1.0 through 4.1.37
* 5.5.0 through 5.5.26

Solution
Apache Tomcat 5.5.x:
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Provided and/or discovered by
1) The vendor credits Konstantin Kolinko.
2) The vendor credits Stefano Di Paola of Minded Security Research Labs.
3) Simon Ryeo

Changelog
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Original Advisory
Apache:
http://tomcat.apache.org/security-4.html
http://tomcat.apache.org/security-5.html

http://marc.info/?l=tomcat-user&m=121759964027135&w=2
http://marc.info/?l=tomcat-user&m=121759966427171&w=2

Simon Ryeo:
http://milw0rm.com/exploits/6229

Other references
Further details available to Secunia VIM customers

Deep Links
Links available to Secunia VIM customers