STIGUI
V-259085CAT II — Medium severitySV-259085r1265191_rule

The vCenter Perfcharts service must enable "STRICT_SERVLET_COMPLIANCE".

Rule version VCPF-80-000124 · STIG v2 · 2026-08-26

Discussion

Strict Servlet Compliance forces Tomcat to adhere to standards specifications including but not limited to RFC2109. RFC2109 sets the standard for HTTP session management. This setting affects several other settings that primarily pertain to cookie headers, cookie values, and sessions. Cookies will be parsed for strict adherence to specifications.

Note that changing a number of these default settings may break some systems, as some browsers are unable to correctly handle the cookie headers that result from a strict adherence to the specifications.

This one setting changes the default values for the following settings:

org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationContext.GET_RESOURCE_REQUIRE_SLASH org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.WRAP_SAME_OBJECT org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.ACCESS_SESSION org.apache.catalina.session.StandardSession.ACTIVITY_CHECK org.apache.catalina.session.StandardSession.LAST_ACCESS_AT_START org.apache.tomcat.util.http.ServerCookie.ALWAYS_ADD_EXPIRES org.apache.tomcat.util.http.ServerCookie.FWD_SLASH_IS_SEPARATOR org.apache.tomcat.util.http.ServerCookie.PRESERVE_COOKIE_HEADER org.apache.tomcat.util.http.ServerCookie.STRICT_NAMING The "resourceOnlyServlets" attribute of any Context element. The "tldValidation" attribute of any Context element. The "useRelativeRedirects" attribute of any Context element. The "xmlNamespaceAware" attribute of any Context element. The "xmlValidation" attribute of any Context element.

Check

At the command line, run the following command:

# grep STRICT_SERVLET_COMPLIANCE /usr/lib/vmware-perfcharts/tc-instance/conf/catalina.properties

Example result:

org.apache.catalina.STRICT_SERVLET_COMPLIANCE=true

If there are no results, or if the "org.apache.catalina.STRICT_SERVLET_COMPLIANCE" is not set to "true", this is a finding.

Fix

Navigate to and open:

/usr/lib/vmware-perfcharts/tc-instance/conf/catalina.properties

Add or change the following line:

org.apache.catalina.STRICT_SERVLET_COMPLIANCE=true

Restart the service with the following command:

# vmon-cli --restart perfcharts

Identifiers

Group ID
V-259085
Group title
SRG-APP-000516-AS-000237
Rule ID
SV-259085r1265191_rule
Check ID
C-62825r934911_chk
Fix ID
F-62734r934912_fix