CWE-663: Use of a Non-reentrant Function in a Concurrent Context
Learn about CWE-663 (Use of a Non-reentrant Function in a Concurrent Context), its security impact, exploitation methods, and prevention guidelines.
What is Use of a Non-reentrant Function in a Concurrent Context?
• Overview: Use of a Non-reentrant Function in a Concurrent Context refers to the vulnerability where a program uses functions that are not designed to be safely called multiple times simultaneously in a multi-threaded environment. This can lead to unpredictable behavior or corruption of data.
• Exploitation Methods:
- Attackers can exploit this vulnerability by triggering concurrent execution paths that call the unsafe function simultaneously, leading to data corruption or unexpected behavior.
- Common attack patterns involve inducing race conditions or manipulating the timing of thread execution to affect shared resources accessed by non-reentrant functions.
• Security Impact:
- Direct consequences of successful exploitation include data corruption, application crashes, and security breaches due to inconsistent program states.
- Potential cascading effects can result in broader system instability or the compromise of other parts of the application relying on the affected data.
- Business impact might include loss of data integrity, reduced reliability of services, and potential financial losses due to application downtime or exploitation.
• Prevention Guidelines:
- Specific code-level fixes include replacing non-reentrant functions with reentrant or thread-safe alternatives, or using synchronization mechanisms like mutexes to control access.
- Security best practices involve identifying critical sections of code and ensuring they are thread-safe, as well as thoroughly testing concurrent execution paths.
- Recommended tools and frameworks include static analysis tools for detecting non-reentrant function usage and employing concurrency-safe libraries to handle multi-threaded operations.
Technical Details
Likelihood of Exploit: Not specified
Affected Languages: Not specified
Affected Technologies: Not specified