CVE Vulnerabilities

CVE-2020-17527

Exposure of Sensitive Information to an Unauthorized Actor

Published: Dec 03, 2020 | Modified: Nov 07, 2023
CVSS 3.x
7.5
HIGH
Source:
NVD
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
CVSS 2.x
5 MEDIUM
AV:N/AC:L/Au:N/C:P/I:N/A:N
RedHat/V2
RedHat/V3
7.5 MODERATE
CVSS:3.1/AV:N/AC:L/PR:N/UI:N/S:U/C:H/I:N/A:N
Ubuntu
MEDIUM

While investigating bug 64830 it was discovered that Apache Tomcat 10.0.0-M1 to 10.0.0-M9, 9.0.0-M1 to 9.0.39 and 8.5.0 to 8.5.59 could re-use an HTTP request header value from the previous stream received on an HTTP/2 connection for the request associated with the subsequent stream. While this would most likely lead to an error and the closure of the HTTP/2 connection, it is possible that information could leak between requests.

Weakness

The product exposes sensitive information to an actor that is not explicitly authorized to have access to that information.

Affected Software

Name Vendor Start Version End Version
Tomcat Apache 8.5.1 (including) 8.5.59 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.1 (including) 9.0.35 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone10 (including) 9.0.0-milestone10 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone11 (including) 9.0.0-milestone11 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone12 (including) 9.0.0-milestone12 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone13 (including) 9.0.0-milestone13 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone14 (including) 9.0.0-milestone14 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone15 (including) 9.0.0-milestone15 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone16 (including) 9.0.0-milestone16 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone17 (including) 9.0.0-milestone17 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone18 (including) 9.0.0-milestone18 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone19 (including) 9.0.0-milestone19 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone20 (including) 9.0.0-milestone20 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone21 (including) 9.0.0-milestone21 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone22 (including) 9.0.0-milestone22 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone23 (including) 9.0.0-milestone23 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone24 (including) 9.0.0-milestone24 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone25 (including) 9.0.0-milestone25 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone26 (including) 9.0.0-milestone26 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone27 (including) 9.0.0-milestone27 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone5 (including) 9.0.0-milestone5 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone6 (including) 9.0.0-milestone6 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone7 (including) 9.0.0-milestone7 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone8 (including) 9.0.0-milestone8 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.0-milestone9 (including) 9.0.0-milestone9 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.35-3.39.1 (including) 9.0.35-3.39.1 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.35-3.57.3 (including) 9.0.35-3.57.3 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.36 (including) 9.0.36 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.37 (including) 9.0.37 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.38 (including) 9.0.38 (including)
Tomcat Apache 9.0.39 (including) 9.0.39 (including)
Tomcat Apache 10.0.0-milestone1 (including) 10.0.0-milestone1 (including)
Tomcat Apache 10.0.0-milestone2 (including) 10.0.0-milestone2 (including)
Tomcat Apache 10.0.0-milestone3 (including) 10.0.0-milestone3 (including)
Tomcat Apache 10.0.0-milestone4 (including) 10.0.0-milestone4 (including)
Tomcat Apache 10.0.0-milestone5 (including) 10.0.0-milestone5 (including)
Tomcat Apache 10.0.0-milestone6 (including) 10.0.0-milestone6 (including)
Tomcat Apache 10.0.0-milestone7 (including) 10.0.0-milestone7 (including)
Tomcat Apache 10.0.0-milestone8 (including) 10.0.0-milestone8 (including)
Tomcat Apache 10.0.0-milestone9 (including) 10.0.0-milestone9 (including)
Red Hat Fuse 7.10 RedHat tomcat *
Red Hat JBoss Web Server 5 RedHat tomcat *
Red Hat JBoss Web Server 5.4 on RHEL 7 RedHat jws5-tomcat-0:9.0.36-9.redhat_8.1.el7jws *
Red Hat JBoss Web Server 5.4 on RHEL 7 RedHat jws5-tomcat-native-0:1.2.25-3.redhat_3.el7jws *
Red Hat JBoss Web Server 5.4 on RHEL 8 RedHat jws5-tomcat-0:9.0.36-9.redhat_8.1.el8jws *
Red Hat JBoss Web Server 5.4 on RHEL 8 RedHat jws5-tomcat-native-0:1.2.25-3.redhat_3.el8jws *
Red Hat Support for Spring Boot 2.4.9 RedHat tomcat *
Tomcat8 Ubuntu bionic *
Tomcat8 Ubuntu esm-apps/bionic *
Tomcat8 Ubuntu trusty *
Tomcat9 Ubuntu bionic *
Tomcat9 Ubuntu focal *
Tomcat9 Ubuntu groovy *
Tomcat9 Ubuntu trusty *
Tomcat9 Ubuntu upstream *

Extended Description

There are many different kinds of mistakes that introduce information exposures. The severity of the error can range widely, depending on the context in which the product operates, the type of sensitive information that is revealed, and the benefits it may provide to an attacker. Some kinds of sensitive information include:

Information might be sensitive to different parties, each of which may have their own expectations for whether the information should be protected. These parties include:

Information exposures can occur in different ways:

It is common practice to describe any loss of confidentiality as an “information exposure,” but this can lead to overuse of CWE-200 in CWE mapping. From the CWE perspective, loss of confidentiality is a technical impact that can arise from dozens of different weaknesses, such as insecure file permissions or out-of-bounds read. CWE-200 and its lower-level descendants are intended to cover the mistakes that occur in behaviors that explicitly manage, store, transfer, or cleanse sensitive information.

Potential Mitigations

  • Compartmentalize the system to have “safe” areas where trust boundaries can be unambiguously drawn. Do not allow sensitive data to go outside of the trust boundary and always be careful when interfacing with a compartment outside of the safe area.
  • Ensure that appropriate compartmentalization is built into the system design, and the compartmentalization allows for and reinforces privilege separation functionality. Architects and designers should rely on the principle of least privilege to decide the appropriate time to use privileges and the time to drop privileges.

References