by: Magno Logan (Information Security Specialist)
Discussions surrounding the Ghostcat vulnerability (CVE-2020-1938 and CNVD-2020-10487) found in Apache Tomcat puts it in the spotlight as researchers looked into its security impact, specifically its potential use for remote code execution (RCE).
Apache Tomcat is a popular open-source Java servlet container, so the discovery of Ghostcat understandably set off some alarms. This blog entry seeks to put the most feared Ghostcat-related scenario into perspective by delving into the unlikely circumstances that would make it possible to allow an RCE through the vulnerability.
The AJP Protocol
Ghostcat was discovered on Feb. 20 by Chaitin Tech security researchers, who reported that the vulnerability exists in the Apache JServ Protocol (AJP). The AJP is a binary protocol used by the Apache Tomcat webserver to communicate with the servlet container that sits behind the webserver using TCP connections. It is mainly used in a cluster or reverse proxy scenario where web servers communicate with application servers or servlet containers.
In simple terms, this means that the HTTP Connector is exposed to clients, while the AJP is used internally between the webserver (e.g., Apache HTTPD) and the Apache Tomcat server (illustrated in Figure 1). AJP is implemented as a module in the Apache HTTP Server, represented as mod_ ..
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