4.2 Restrict access to $CATALINA_BASE

Warning! Audit Deprecated

This audit has been deprecated and will be removed in a future update.

View Next Audit Version

Information

$CATALINA_BASE is the environment variable that specifies the base directory which most relative paths are resolved. $CATALINA_BASE is usually used when there are multiple instances of Tomcat running. It is important to protect access to this in order to protect the Tomcat-related binaries and libraries from unauthorized modification. It is recommended that the ownership of $CATALINA_BASE be tomcat_admin:tomcat. It is also recommended that the permissions on $CATALINA_BASE prevent read, write, and execute for the world (o-rwx) and prevent write access to the group (g-w).

Solution

Perform the following to establish the recommended state:
1. Set the ownership of the $CATALINA_BASE to tomcat_admin:tomcat.
2. Remove read, write, and execute permissions for the world
3. Remove write permissions for the group.
# chown tomcat_admin.tomcat $CATALINA_BASE
# chmod g-w,o-rwx $CATALINA_BASE

See Also

https://workbench.cisecurity.org/files/267

Item Details

Category: CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT

References: 800-53|CM-6, CSCv6|3.1

Plugin: Unix

Control ID: d019dc71f4bd2aa8cb4603096438b865455c4d0225879f22ef56f265e67feac5