Apache Tomcat Container Managed Security and HTTP Security Headers

Secure j_security_check Response Headers

Introduction

I was recently tasked with resolving a security issue with Apache Tomcat. The issue was that a series of Filter classes that were implemented in the web.xml were being bypassed when we are using container managed security, e.g. j_security_check. The filters were adding security headers:

• X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
• X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
• X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block

When the response is returned, it would include these values. The filters were written prior to the org.apache.catalina.filters.HttpHeaderSecurityFilter. They duplicate the functionality, but the Apache version has a few more features. The Apache version is generally implemented in the web.xml file for the whole server, e.g., <CATALINA_HOME>/conf/web.xml. The code is really well written, and I would recommend using it except if you are using container managed security.

Issue

Container managed security,j_security_check, is implemented using a Valve. In particular, this intercepts the call and returns the form based login page which contains something like this: The resulting response does not contain the headers noted above using either our custom filters, nor from the Apache HttpHeaderSecurityFilter. Our automated security testing software, OWASP Zap caught it.

Solution

The easiest solution I came up with was to implement a couple of valves that add the selected response headers. I then added the Valve implementations to the <CATALINA_HOME>/conf/context.xml. Adding them to the default context.xml file allows them to be used on all applications deployed to the server. If you don't want applied to every application, you can add it to the context.xml file in the individual project.

The project can be found on Github here: tomcat-security-valves.

<dependency>
  <groupId>com.bluelotussoftware</groupId>
  <artifactId>tomcat-security-valves</artifactId>
  <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>

An example application using the default Apache Tomcat realm is available here: tomcat-container-managed-security

XContentTypeOptionsValve.java

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XFrameOptionsValve.java

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XSSProtectionValve.java

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