CVE-2002-0935 Apache Tomcat DoS Via Requests Including Null Characters

What is CVE-2002-0935?

CVE-2002-0935 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Apache Tomcat, published on 2 Apr 2003. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Apache Tomcat 4.0.3, and possibly other versions before 4.1.3 beta, allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (resource exhaustion) via a large number of requests to the server with null characters, which causes the working threads to hang.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2002-0935?

2 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.apache.tomcat:tomcat. It affects 1 product.

Products include Apache Tomcat.

How do I fix CVE-2002-0935?

Upgrade org.apache.tomcat:tomcat to 4.1.3-beta or later.

Upgrade, then put limits on request size, rate and nesting depth so one client cannot exhaust the service. More about Denial of service.

Is CVE-2002-0935 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2002-0935 in the wild and no public exploit code.

Other vulnerabilities in Apache Tomcat

• CVE-2025-24813 Apache Tomcat Path Equivalence Exploited Critical 10.0
• CVE-2016-8735 Apache Tomcat Remote Code Execution Exploited Critical 9.8
• CVE-2017-12617 Apache Tomcat Remote Code Execution Exploited High 8.1
• CVE-2017-12615 Apache Tomcat on Windows Remote Code Execution Exploited High 8.1
• CVE-2026-34486 Apache Tomcat Missing Encryption of Sensitive Data Exploited High 7.5

All Apache Tomcat vulnerabilities

Sources

• CVE record
• NVD
• OSV
• GitHub advisory
• How this page is made

Also known as GHSA-xmf4-j3j7-xj7q.