COMMON WEAKNESS ENUMERATIONDraft

CWE-667

Improper Locking

The product does not properly acquire or release a lock on a resource, leading to unexpected resource state changes and behaviors.

Abstraction

Class

Structure

Simple

Likelihood of Exploit

Medium

Understand the problem

What is the problem?

The product does not properly acquire or release a lock on a resource, leading to unexpected resource state changes and behaviors.

Extended description

Locking is a type of synchronization behavior that ensures that multiple independently-operating processes or threads do not interfere with each other when accessing the same resource. All processes/threads are expected to follow the same steps for locking. If these steps are not followed precisely - or if no locking is done at all - then another process/thread could modify the shared resource in a way that is not visible or predictable to the original process. This can lead to data or memory corruption, denial of service, etc.

Root cause

How and when does the problem arise?

Lifecycle phase

Architecture and Design

Lifecycle phase

Implementation

Risk

What does successful exploitation lead to?

DoS: Resource Consumption (CPU)

Affected security scopes: Availability

Inconsistent locking discipline can lead to deadlock.

Defence

How is it prevented and fixed?

Implementation

Libraries or Frameworks

Detail
Use industry standard APIs to implement locking mechanism.

Verification

How is it detected?

Automated Static Analysis

High
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.)
CWE-667: Common Weakness Enumeration Entry CWE-667 · DayBreach Sözlük · DayBreach