CWE-667: Improper Locking

What is Improper Locking?

• Overview: Improper Locking occurs when a program does not correctly acquire or release a lock on a shared resource, leading to possible inconsistent states and unintended interactions between processes or threads.

• Exploitation Methods:

• Attackers can exploit this by creating race conditions where multiple threads or processes improperly access shared resources.
• Common attack patterns include manipulating the timing of thread execution to cause unexpected behavior in resource access.

• Security Impact:

• Direct consequences include data corruption and memory corruption.
• Potential cascading effects can result in denial of service or unpredictable program behavior.
• Business impact may include loss of data integrity, application downtime, and compromised system reliability.

• Prevention Guidelines:

• Specific code-level fixes involve ensuring proper lock acquisition and release using synchronized blocks or lock objects.
• Security best practices include avoiding deadlocks and ensuring that locks are always released in a finally block or using try-with-resources.
• Recommended tools and frameworks include using concurrency libraries like Java's java.util.concurrent and analyzing code for thread safety issues with static analysis tools.

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Technical Details

Likelihood of Exploit: Not specified

Affected Languages: Not specified

Affected Technologies: Not specified