CWE-362Concurrent Execution using Shared Resource with Improper Synchronization ('Race Condition')

Description

Common consequences· 4

• Availability — DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU), DoS: Resource Consumption (Memory), DoS: Resource Consumption (Other)
  When a race condition makes it possible to bypass a resource cleanup routine or trigger multiple initialization routines, it may lead to resource exhaustion.
• Availability — DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, DoS: Instability
  When a race condition allows multiple control flows to access a resource simultaneously, it might lead the product(s) into unexpected states, possibly resulting in a crash.
• Confidentiality / Integrity — Read Files or Directories, Read Application Data
  When a race condition is combined with predictable resource names and loose permissions, it may be possible for an attacker to overwrite or access confidential data (CWE-59).
• Access Control — Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands, Gain Privileges or Assume Identity, Bypass Protection Mechanism
  This can have security implications when the expected synchronization is in security-critical code, such as recording whether a user is authenticated or modifying important state information that should not be influenced by an outsider.

Potential mitigations· 5

• [Architecture and Design]In languages that support it, use synchronization primitives. Only wrap these around critical code to minimize the impact on performance.
• [Architecture and Design]Use thread-safe capabilities such as the data access abstraction in Spring.
• [Architecture and Design]
• [Implementation]When using multithreading and operating on shared variables, only use thread-safe functions.
• [Implementation]Use atomic operations on shared variables. Be wary of innocent-looking constructs such as "x++". This may appear atomic at the code layer, but it is actually non-atomic at the instruction layer, since it involves a read, followed by a computation, followed by a write.

Related CAPEC attack patterns· 2

Exploits (incoming)2

(incoming)49

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Related by meaning· 6

Nearest entities by semantic similarity across the cs-graph corpus.