Weakness · Medium
CWE-383: J2EE Bad Practices: Direct Use of Threads
What it is
Thread management in a Web application is forbidden in some circumstances and is always highly error prone.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
Thread management in a web application is forbidden by the J2EE standard in some circumstances and is always highly error prone. Managing threads is difficult and is likely to interfere in unpredictable ways with the behavior of the application container. Even without interfering with the container, thread management usually leads to bugs that are hard to detect and diagnose like deadlock, race conditions, and other synchronization errors.
What an attacker can do
- Quality Degradation (Other)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- For EJB, use framework approaches for parallel execution, instead of using threads.
How to find it
- 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.)
H2 Security
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.