CVE-2005-2090 Tomcat Vulnerable to Web Cache Poisoning

What is CVE-2005-2090?

CVE-2005-2090 is a medium-severity vulnerability in Apache Tomcat, published on 30 Jun 2005. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

Jakarta Tomcat 5.0.19 (Coyote/1.1) and Tomcat 4.1.24 (Coyote/1.0) allows remote attackers to poison the web cache, bypass web application firewall protection, and conduct XSS attacks via an HTTP request with both a "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" header and a Content-Length header, which causes Tomcat to incorrectly handle and forward the body of the request in a way that causes the receiving server to process it as a separate HTTP request, aka "HTTP Request Smuggling."

Which versions are affected by CVE-2005-2090?

4 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-2005-2090?

Upgrade to a fixed version.

Is CVE-2005-2090 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2005-2090 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-f2gq-p6qv-ccw4.