CWE-366: Race Condition within a Thread | Glexia
CWE-366 (Race Condition within a Thread) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-366: Race Condition within a Thread
Race Condition within a Thread represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity,Other: Alter Execution Logic,Unexpected State: The main problem is that -- if a lock is overcome -- data could be altered in a bad state.
Developer Pattern
CWE-366 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-366, 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-366: Race Condition within a Thread
If two threads of execution use a resource simultaneously, there exists the possibility that resources may be used while invalid, in turn making the state of execution undefined.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- The following example demonstrates the weakness.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Use locking functionality. This is the recommended solution. Implement some form of locking mechanism around code which alters or reads persistent data in a multithreaded environment.
- Architecture and Design: Create resource-locking validation checks. If no inherent locking mechanisms exist, use flags and signals to enforce your own blocking scheme when resources are being used by other threads of execution.
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
Related CWEs
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.