CWE-543: Use of Singleton Pattern Without Synchronization… | Glexia
CWE-543 (Use of Singleton Pattern Without Synchronization in a Multithreaded Context) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related…
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-543: Use of Singleton Pattern Without Synchronization in a Multithreaded Context
Use of Singleton Pattern Without Synchronization in a Multithreaded Context represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Other,Integrity: Other,Modify Application Data
Developer Pattern
CWE-543 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-543, 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-543: Use of Singleton Pattern Without Synchronization in a Multithreaded Context
The product uses the singleton pattern when creating a resource within a multithreaded environment.
The use of a singleton pattern may not be thread-safe.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- This method is part of a singleton pattern, yet the following singleton() pattern is not thread-safe. It is possible that the method will create two objects instead of only one. Consider the following course of events:, ,At this point, the threads have created and returned two different objects.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Use the Thread-Specific Storage Pattern. See References.
- Implementation: Do not use member fields to store information in the Servlet. In multithreading environments, storing user data in Servlet member fields introduces a data access race condition.
- Implementation: Avoid using the double-checked locking pattern in language versions that cannot guarantee thread safety. This pattern may be used to avoid the overhead of a synchronized call, but in certain versions of Java (for example), this has been shown to be unsafe because it still introduces a race condition (CWE-209).
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.