Weakness · Medium

CWE-414: Missing Lock Check

What it is

A product does not check to see if a lock is present before performing sensitive operations on a resource.

MITRE CWE 4.19.1

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

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

  • Implement a reliable lock mechanism.

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.)

CWE-414 on MITRE's CWE site

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Source: MITRE Common Weakness Enumeration, CWE version 4.19.1. CWE is a trademark of The MITRE Corporation.