Impact of Ghostcat (CVE-2020-1938) with Service Management r17.x

Products

• CA Service Desk Manager
• SUPPORT AUTOMATION- SERVER
• CA Service Desk Manager - Unified Self Service
• CA Service Desk Manager - Mobile Application
• CA Service Desk Manager - Xtraction
• CA Service Catalog
• CA IT Asset Manager
• CA IT Asset Manager Asset Portfolio Management

Issue/Introduction

Do Service Desk Manager/Service Catalog/IT Asset Manager get impacted by Ghostcat vulnerability (CVE-2020-1938)  https://www.cisecurity.org/advisory/a-vulnerability-in-apache-tomcat-could-allow-for-arbitrary-file-reading-cve-2020-1938_2020-028/

Environment

Release : 17.x

Component : SERVICE DESK MANAGER

Cause

Ghostcat (CVE-2020-1938)  https://www.cisecurity.org/advisory/a-vulnerability-in-apache-tomcat-could-allow-for-arbitrary-file-reading-cve-2020-1938_2020-028/

Resolution

We do not depend on AJP protocol out of the box in Service Desk Manager.  Service Catalog's might be used when its made part of out of the box cluster configuration.


AJP connector can be disabled so that the exposure of this vulnerability does not happen.

Commenting of the AJP connector can be done like indicated in below example on any Tomcat's server.xml files.  

Below indicates that the connector is commented out.
 <!-- Define an AJP 1.3 Connector on port 8009 -->
    <!-- <Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" xpoweredBy="false" allowTrace="false"></Connector> -->



If AJP Connector cannot be disabled and needs to be used (example: Catalog Cluster configuration), you can configure the “requiredSecret” attribute for the AJP Connector to set AJP protocol authentication credentials. For example (YOUR_TOMCAT_AJP_SECRET is your password)

<Connector port="8009" protocol="AJP/1.3" redirectPort="8443" address="YOUR_TOMCAT_IP_ADDRESS" requiredSecret="YOUR_TOMCAT_AJP_SECRET"

Save the file and restart appropriate product for the change to be effective

Additional Information

Out of the box, NX_ROOT/bopcfg/CATALINA_BASE  CATALINA_BASE_FS  CATALINA_BASE_REST CATALINA_BASE_SA  CATALINA_BASE_VIZ    are the main Tomcat engines that SDM offers.