CWE-662: Improper Synchronization | Glexia
CWE-662 (Improper Synchronization) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-662: Improper Synchronization
Improper Synchronization represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity Confidentiality Other: Modify Application Data Read Application Data Alter Execution Logic
Developer Pattern
CWE-662 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-662, 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-662: Improper Synchronization
The product utilizes multiple threads, processes, components, or systems to allow temporary access to a shared resource that can only be exclusive to one process at a time, but it does not properly synchronize these actions, which might cause simultaneous accesses of this resource by multiple threads or processes.
Synchronization refers to a variety of behaviors and mechanisms that allow two or more independently-operating processes or threads to ensure that they operate on shared resources in predictable ways that do not interfere with each other. Some shared resource operations cannot be executed atomically; that is, multiple steps must be guaranteed to execute sequentially, without any interference by other processes. Synchronization mechanisms vary widely, but they may include locking, mutexes, and semaphores. When a multi-step operation on a shared resource cannot be guaranteed to execute independent of interference, then the resulting behavior can be unpredictable. Improper synchronization could lead to data or memory corruption, denial of service, etc.
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.
- The following code intends to fork a process, then have both the parent and child processes print a single line. One might expect the code to print out something like: PARENT child However, because the parent and child are executing concurrently, and stdout is flushed each time a character is printed, the output might be mixed together, such as: PcAhRiElNdT [blank line] [blank line]
Remediation
- Implementation: Use industry standard APIs to synchronize your code.
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
No related CWE relationships are published yet.
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.