Re: False Positive Vulnerabilities in el-api.jar from Official Apache Tomcat Distribution

Christopher Schultz <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.jakarta.tomcat.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Piotr,

On 11/8/25 4:39 AM, Piotr P. Karwasz wrote:
> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> On 7.11.2025 17:43, Christopher Schultz wrote:
>> Please provide the detection analysis from OWASP Dependency Checker. I'm
>> looking for the "identifiers" that OWASP has used to identify your library.
>>
>> For example, for commons-beanutils:
>>
>> Identifiers
>>
>>      pkg:maven/commons-beanutils/[email protected]  (Confidence:High)
>>      cpe:2.3:a:apache:commons_beanutils:1.11.0:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
>> (Confidence:Highest)
>>
>>
>> What does is show for el-api.jar?
> 
> 
> *TL;DR:* Sathish is most likely using a repackaged version of
> `el-api.jar`, not the original Tomcat artifact.

I agree. I wanted to walk him through the process to discover this 
himself :)

> I ran OWASP Dependency-Check 12.1.1 against Tomcat 11.0.10 (the same
> setup as the OP). Dependency-Check identifies el-api.jar with high
> confidence as:
> 
>    pkg:maven/org.apache.tomcat/[email protected]
> 
> and no other identifiers.
> 
> Since Tomcat builds are reproducible, the JAR is easily verifiable by
> its SHA-1:
> 
> https://search.maven.org/solrsearch/select?q=1:0cf38ceee2c2f23aa28dd121253f019a4ad1186a

+1

> When I modify the JAR, Dependency-Check falls back to some CPE
> identifiers, which of course report all CVEs in Tomcat 11.0.10 *and* 6.0.0:
> 
>    cpe:2.3:a:apache:tomcat:6.0.0:*:*:*:*:*:*:*
>    cpe:2.3:a:apache_tomcat:apache_tomcat:11.0.10:*:*:*:*:*:*:*

LOL Tomcat 6. I guess you have to cast a wide net if you can't decide 
what something is.

I use OWASP dependency-check at $work, and we always have to tell it 
that JARs aren't what it thinks they are. It's like whack-a-mole.

-chris
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