CWE-364Signal Handler Race Condition

Description

Common consequences· 2

• Integrity / Confidentiality / Availability — Modify Application Data, Modify Memory, DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart, Execute Unauthorized Code or Commands
  It may be possible to cause data corruption and possibly execute arbitrary code by modifying global variables or data structures at unexpected times, violating the assumptions of code that uses this global data.
• Access Control — Gain Privileges or Assume Identity
  If a signal handler interrupts code that is executing with privileges, it may be possible that the signal handler will also be executed with elevated privileges, possibly making subsequent exploits more severe.

Potential mitigations· 3

• [Requirements]Use a language that does not allow this weakness to occur or provides constructs that make this weakness easier to avoid.
• [Architecture and Design]Design signal handlers to only set flags, rather than perform complex functionality. These flags can then be checked and acted upon within the main program loop.
• [Implementation]Only use reentrant functions within signal handlers. Also, use validation to ensure that state is consistent while performing asynchronous actions that affect the state of execution.

(incoming)1

Related by meaning· 6

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