Title

Tomcat must limit the number of concurrent sessions to an organization-defined number for all accounts and/or account types. (Cat II impact)

Discussion

Application management includes the ability to control the number of sessions that utilize an application by all accounts and/or account types. Limiting the number of allowed sessions is helpful in limiting risks related to Denial of Service attacks. Application servers host and expose business logic and application processes. The application server must possess the capability to limit the maximum number of concurrent sessions in a manner that affects the entire application server or on an individual application basis. Although there is some latitude concerning the settings themselves, the settings should follow DoD-recommended values, but the settings should be configurable to allow for future DoD direction. While the DoD will specify recommended values, the values can be adjusted to accommodate the operational requirement of a given system.

Check Content

Review the Tomcat server.xml configuration to determine if the maxConnections under the Connector node is set to the organization-defined number of sessions. If a feature to limit the number of concurrent sessions is not set or is set to unlimited, this is a finding.

Fix Text

Configure the application server to limit the number of concurrent sessions for all accounts and/or account types to the organization-defined number.

Additional Identifiers

Rule ID: SV-46335r3_rule

Vulnerability ID: V-35070

Group Title:

Expert Comments

CCIs tied to check.

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