CVE-2003-0045 Jakarta Tomcat Denial of Service vulnerability

What is CVE-2003-0045?

CVE-2003-0045 is a medium-severity denial of service vulnerability in Apache Tomcat, published on 1 Sep 2004. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Jakarta Tomcat before 3.3.1a on certain Windows systems may allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (thread hang and resource consumption) via a request for a JSP page containing an MS-DOS device name, such as aux.jsp.

Which versions are affected by CVE-2003-0045?

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-2003-0045?

Upgrade org.apache.tomcat:tomcat to 3.3.1a 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-2003-0045 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2003-0045 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-w97x-xfxf-f9xj.