CWE-368: Context Switching Race Condition | Glexia
CWE-368 (Context Switching Race Condition) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-368: Context Switching Race Condition
Context Switching Race Condition represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity,Confidentiality: Modify Application Data,Read Application Data
Developer Pattern
CWE-368 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-368, 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-368: Context Switching Race Condition
A product performs a series of non-atomic actions to switch between contexts that cross privilege or other security boundaries, but a race condition allows an attacker to modify or misrepresent the product's behavior during the switch.
This is commonly seen in web browser vulnerabilities in which the attacker can perform certain actions while the browser is transitioning from a trusted to an untrusted domain, or vice versa, and the browser performs the actions on one domain using the trust level and resources of the other domain.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- Missing validation
- Unsafe defaults
- Insufficient authorization or memory-safety invariant
Remediation
- Use safe APIs
- Centralize the control
- Add regression tests
- Review logs and telemetry for attempted abuse
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.