Weakness · Medium
CWE-413: Improper Resource Locking
What it is
The product does not lock or does not correctly lock a resource when the product must have exclusive access to the resource.
- Severity (our rating)
- Medium
- Likelihood of exploit
- Not rated by MITRE
- Introduced during
- Architecture and Design, Implementation
- Exploited in the wild
- No CVE in CISA's catalog
In more detail
When a resource is not properly locked, an attacker could modify the resource while it is being operated on by the product. This might violate the product's assumption that the resource will not change, potentially leading to unexpected behaviors.
What an attacker can do
- Modify Application Data (Integrity, Availability)
- DoS: Instability (Integrity, Availability)
- DoS: Crash, Exit, or Restart (Integrity, Availability)
How to prevent it
Architecture and Design
- Use a non-conflicting privilege scheme.
- Use synchronization when locking a resource.
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.)
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Start freeSource: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.