Manager, host-manager – Tomcat administration.Examples – JSP and servlets for demonstration.You can delete them to keep it clean and avoid any known security risk with Tomcat default application. Start the Tomcat and ensure it’s running with tomcat user Remove default/unwanted Applicationsīy default, Tomcat comes with following web applications, which may or not be required in a production environment. Change $tomcat ownership to user tomcat.The idea here is to protect other services running in case of any of account get compromised. It’s good to use a separate non-privileged user for Tomcat. Save the file and restart Tomcat to examine the HTTP response header. This is done by adding below the line in session-config section of the web.xml file It’s a flag which is injected in the response header. It is possible to steal or manipulate web application session and cookies without having a secure cookie. Once you’ve enabled SSL, it would be good to force redirect all HTTP requests to HTTPS for secure communication between user to Tomcat application server. This is only applicable when you’ve SSL enabled. If you need help with the keystore & CSR process, then refer to this guide.
APACHE TOMCAT 8 DOES NOT SHOW IN ECLIPSE SERVERS LIST PASSWORD
SSLEnabled="true" scheme="https" keystoreFile="ssl/bloggerflare.jks" keystorePass="chandan" clientAuth="false" sslProtocol="TLS"Ĭhange the Keystore file name and password with yours. In order to make your web application accessible through HTTPS, you need to implement SSL certificate.Īssuming, you already have keystore ready with the certificate, you can add below line in server.xml file under Connector port section. Serving web requests over HTTPS is essential to protect data between client and Tomcat. Using CLASSPATH: /opt/tomcat/bin/bootstrap.jar:/opt/tomcat/bin/tomcat-juli.jar It’s just the way you execute startup.sh file.Īll you got to do is to start tomcat with –security argument. The good thing about this is you don’t need to change any configuration file. Tomcat has excellent documentation on Tomcat Security Manager. Running Tomcat with a security manager is better than running without one. Security Manager protects you from an untrusted applet running in your browser. Now, when you access an application, you should see a blank value for the Server header. Let’s hide the product and version details from the Server header. Having a server banner expose the product and version you are using and leads to information leakage vulnerability.īy default, a page served by Tomcat will show like this. Removing Server Banner from HTTP Header is one of the first things to do as hardening. Let’s go through the hardening & securing procedures. We will call Tomcat Installation folder as $tomcat throughout this guidelines. If testing Internet-facing application, then you may use the following HTTP Header tools to verify the implementation.Īnd for an Intranet application, you may use Google Chrome, Firefox developer tools.Īs a best practice, you must take a backup of any file you are about to modify. We require some tool to examine HTTP Headers for verification. Good knowledge of Tomcat & UNIX command is mandatory. This is designed for Middleware Administrator, Application Support, System Analyst, or anyone working or eager to learn Tomcat Hardening and Security. Having default Tomcat configuration may expose sensitive information, which helps hacker to prepare for an attack on the application.įollowing are tested on Tomcat 7.x, UNIX environment. If you are using Apache HTTP as a front-end web server, then you must consider securing that as well. Using a web server to handle the requests gives performance and security benefits. However, in a production environment, you may want to use some web servers like Apache, Nginx as front-end to route the requests to the Tomcat. Technically, you can use Tomcat as a front-end server to serve site requests directly. It’s used by some of following high traffic websites:īelow chart shows the market position of Tomcat in the Java application server. Tomcat is one of the most popular Servlet and JSP Container servers. A practical guide to hardening and secure Apache Tomcat Server with the best practices.