Title

The Tomcat server must provide centralized management and configuration of the content to be captured in log records generated by all application components. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

A clustered application server is made up of several servers working together to provide the user a failover and increased computing capability. To facilitate uniform logging in the event of an incident and later forensic investigation, the record format and logable events need to be uniform. This can be managed best from a centralized server. Without the ability to centrally manage the content captured in the log records, identification, troubleshooting, and correlation of suspicious behavior would be difficult and could lead to a delayed or incomplete analysis of an ongoing attack.

Check Content

Review the server.xml configuration file for Tomcat server and verify that logging has been setup with at least the following entries: %h %l %u %t %r %s %b In the server.xml file look for the following section in the xml: <Valve className="org.apache.catalina.valves.AccessLogValve" directory="logs" prefix="localhost_access_log." suffix=".txt" pattern="%h %l %u %t "%r" %s %b" /> If the pattern attribute does not contain “common” or at least the following : “%h %l %u %t %r %s %b”, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Configure the application server to allow centralized management and configuration of the content to be captured in log records.

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-71691r2_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-57419

Group Title:

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

Controls tied to check. These are derived from the CCIs shown above.