A couple of observations:
- If someone can read the context descriptor they pretty much own
Tomcat and probably the server as well. If this person is unauthorised,
you have big problems regardless of whether or not they have read-only
access to the database.
- If the password is encrypted, where do you store the decryption key?
Tomcat still needs to be able to decrypt the password in order to use
it to access the database. At best, this is security by obscurity
which is not very good security at all.
You could write some custom code that required the password to be
entered on the command line when Tomcat starts but this still has the
following issues:
- If Tomcat goes down, you need someone who knows the password to
restart it. If the group of people that know the password is small,
you have an availability issue.
- Chances are that everyone who administers Tomcat will know this
password. Given that these people should be the only ones with access
at the OS level to the Tomcat configuration files there seems little
point in going to all this trouble.
In my experience securing the configuration files (Tomcat & JVM) using
OS file permissions is usually the appropriate course of action to
take unless your security environment is very unusual.
Mark
Brett Parsons wrote:
Hi All,
There is a requirement on the server that we have Tomcat 5.0.28 deployed
that no username/password information can be stored in plaintext (in the
open). Like many people, we are using JNDI datasources in our web
application. The datasource connection information (including the
database username/password) is stored in the Tomcat Context Descriptor
under TOMCATDIR/conf/Catalina/localhost/myApp.xml.
Does Tomcat provide a more secure way of storing the connection
information stored in these context deployment descriptors? Has anyone
else run into the same problem and been able to solve it somehow?
Thanks,
Brett
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