The vulnerability stems from improper handling of specific characters in cookie values during parsing. The functions responsible for parsing cookies (e.g., processCookieHeader and parseCookieHeader) are directly implicated because the CVE description highlights issues with double quotes and %5C sequences. These functions likely failed to properly escape or validate() these characters, leading to information disclosure. The confidence is high because the Tomcat security team explicitly linked this CVE to cookie parsing logic, and historical fixes for similar CVEs (e.g., CVE-2007-3385) targeted these components.