CVE-2019-10072 Improper Locking in Apache Tomcat

What is CVE-2019-10072?

CVE-2019-10072 is a high-severity denial of service vulnerability in Apache Tomcat, published on 21 Jun 2019. An attacker can exploit it over the internet without logging in, with no action from the victim.

Official description

The fix for CVE-2019-0199 was incomplete and did not address HTTP/2 connection window exhaustion on write in Apache Tomcat versions 9.0.0.M1 to 9.0.19 and 8.5.0 to 8.5.40 . By not sending WINDOW_UPDATE messages for the connection window (stream 0) clients were able to cause server-side threads to block eventually leading to thread exhaustion and a DoS.

Weakness: CWE-667

Which versions are affected by CVE-2019-10072?

4 open source packages ship an affected version, including org.apache.tomcat.embed:tomcat-embed-core. It affects 1 product.

Products include Apache Tomcat.

How do I fix CVE-2019-10072?

Upgrade org.apache.tomcat.embed:tomcat-embed-core to a fixed version for your release line: 8.5.41 or 9.0.20.

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-2019-10072 being exploited?

There is no known exploitation of CVE-2019-10072 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 DEBIAN-CVE-2019-10072, GHSA-q4hg-rmq2-52q9, UBUNTU-CVE-2019-10072.