CWE-413: Improper Resource Locking | Glexia
CWE-413 (Improper Resource Locking) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-413: Improper Resource Locking
Improper Resource Locking represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity,Availability: Modify Application Data,DoS: Instability,DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart
Developer Pattern
CWE-413 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-413, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-413: Improper Resource Locking
The product does not lock or does not correctly lock a resource when the product must have exclusive access to the resource.
When a resource is not properly locked, an attacker could modify the resource while it is being operated on by the product. This might violate the product's assumption that the resource will not change, potentially leading to unexpected behaviors.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following function attempts to acquire a lock in order to perform operations on a shared resource. However, the code does not check the value returned by pthread_mutex_lock() for errors. If pthread_mutex_lock() cannot acquire the mutex for any reason, the function may introduce a race condition into the program and result in undefined behavior.,In order to avoid data races, correctly written programs must check the result of thread synchronization functions and appropriately handle all errors, either by attempting to recover from them or reporting them to higher levels.
- This Java example shows a simple BankAccount class with deposit and withdraw methods. However, the deposit and withdraw methods have shared access to the account balance private class variable. This can result in a race condition if multiple threads attempt to call the deposit and withdraw methods simultaneously where the account balance is modified by one thread before another thread has completed modifying the account balance. For example, if a thread attempts to withdraw funds using the withdraw method before another thread that is depositing funds using the deposit method completes the deposit then there may not be sufficient funds for the withdraw transaction.,To prevent multiple threads from having simultaneous access to the account balance variable the deposit and withdraw methods should be synchronized using the synchronized modifier.,An alternative solution is to use a lock object to ensure exclusive access to the bank account balance variable. As shown below, the deposit and withdraw methods use the lock object to set a lock to block access to the BankAccount object from other threads until the method has completed updating the bank account balance variable.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Use a non-conflicting privilege scheme.
- Architecture and Design,Implementation: Use synchronization when locking a resource.
Detection
- Automated Static Analysis: Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.