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V-259100

CAT II (Medium)

The vCenter Perfcharts service must disable "ALLOW_BACKSLASH".

Rule ID

SV-259100r934958_rule

STIG

VMware vSphere 8.0 vCenter Appliance Perfcharts Security Technical Implementation Guide

Version

V1R1

CCIs

CCI-000366

Discussion

When Tomcat is installed behind a proxy configured to only allow access to certain contexts (web applications), an HTTP request containing "/\../" may allow attackers to work around the proxy restrictions using directory traversal attack methods. If "allow_backslash" is "true", the "\" character will be permitted as a path delimiter. The default value for the setting is "false", but Tomcat must always be configured as if no proxy restricting context access was used, and "allow_backslash" should be set to "false" to prevent directory-traversal-style attacks. This setting can create operability issues with noncompliant clients.

Check Content

At the command line, run the following command:

# grep ALLOW_BACKSLASH /usr/lib/vmware-perfcharts/tc-instance/conf/catalina.properties

Example result:

org.apache.catalina.connector.ALLOW_BACKSLASH=false

If "org.apache.catalina.connector.ALLOW_BACKSLASH" is not set to "false", this is a finding.

If the "org.apache.catalina.connector.ALLOW_BACKSLASH" setting does not exist, this is not a finding.

Fix Text

Navigate to and open:

/usr/lib/vmware-perfcharts/tc-instance/conf/catalina.properties

Update or remove the following line:

org.apache.catalina.connector.ALLOW_BACKSLASH=false

Restart the service with the following command:

# vmon-cli --restart perfcharts