Time of check, time of use race condition

Overview

Time-of-check, time-of-use race conditions occur when between the time in which a given resource is checked, and the time that resource is used, a change occurs in the resource to invalidate the results of the check.

Consequences

• Access control: The attacker can gain access to otherwise unauthorized resources.

• Authorization: race conditions such as this kind may be employed to gain read or write access to resources which are not normally readable or writable by the user in question.

• Integrity: The resource in question, or other resources (through the corrupted one), may be changed in undesirable ways by a malicious user.

• Accountability: If a file or other resource is written in this method, as opposed to in a valid way, logging of the activity may not occur.

• Non-repudiation: In some cases it may be possible to delete files a malicious user might not otherwise have access to, such as log files.

Exposure period

• Design: Strong locking methods may be designed to protect against this flaw.

• Implementation: Use of system APIs may prevent check, use race conditions.

Platform

• Languages: Any

• Platforms: All

Required resources

• Some access to the resource in question

Severity

Medium

Likelihood of exploit

Low to Medium

Avoidance and mitigation

• Design: Ensure that some environmental locking mechanism can be used to protect resources effectively.

• Implementation: Ensure that locking occurs before the check, as opposed to afterwards, such that the resource, as checked, is the same as it is when in use.

Discussion

Time-of-check, time-of-use race conditions occur when a resource is checked for a particular value, that value is changed, then the resource is used, based on the assumption that the value is still the same as it was at check time.

This is a broad category of race condition encompassing binding flaws, locking race conditions, and others.

Examples

In C/C++:

struct stat *sb; .. lstat("...",sb); // it has not been updated since the last time it was read printf("stated file\n"); if (sb->st_mtimespec==...)

 print("Now updating things\n");
 updateThings();

} Potentially the file could have been updated between the time of the check and the lstat, especially since the printf has latency.

Related problems

• State synchronization error