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> AJP is a wire protocol. It an optimized version of the HTTP protocol to allow a standalone web server such as [Apache](http://httpd.apache.org/) to talk to Tomcat. Historically, Apache has been much faster than Tomcat at serving static content. The idea is to let Apache serve the static content when possible, but proxy the request to Tomcat for Tomcat related content.
> The ajp13 protocol is packet-oriented. A binary format was presumably chosen over the more readable plain text for reasons of performance. The web server communicates with the servlet container over TCP connections. To cut down on the expensive process of socket creation, the web server will attempt to maintain persistent TCP connections to the servlet container, and to reuse a connection for multiple request/response cycles
If the AJP port is exposed, Tomcat might be susceptible to the Ghostcat vulnerability. Here is an [exploit](https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/48143) that works with this issue.
Ghostcat is a LFI vulnerability, but somewhat restricted: only files from a certain path can be pulled. Still, this can include files like `WEB-INF/web.xml` which can leak important information like credentials for the Tomcat interface, depending on the server setup.
Patched versions at or above 9.0.31, 8.5.51, and 7.0.100 have fixed this issue.
It’s not often that you encounter port 8009 open and no other web port open. In which case it would be nice to use existing tools like metasploit to still pwn it right? As stated in one of the quotes you can (ab)use Apache to proxy the requests to Tomcat port 8009. In the references you will find a nice guide on how to do that (read it first), what follows is just an overview of the commands I used on my own machine. I omitted some of the original instruction since they didn’t seem to be necessary.
A nice side effect of using this setup is that you might thwart IDS/IPS systems in place since the AJP protocol is somewhat binary, but I haven’t verified this. Now you can just point your regular metasploit tomcat exploit to 127.0.0.1:80 and take over that system. Here is the metasploit output also:
When we come across an open AJP proxy port (8009 TCP), we can use Nginx with the `ajp_module` to access the "hidden" Tomcat Manager. This can be done by compiling the Nginx source code and adding the required module, as follows:
* Download the Nginx source code
* Download the required module
* Compile Nginx source code with the `ajp_module`.
* Create a configuration file pointing to the AJP Port
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