Race Condition

Two operations racing for the same resource, where the attacker wins the gap between check and use.

Specifications & Metrics

cwe

CWE-362

impact

Privilege escalation, data corruption

Core Principles & Analysis

• The classic form is time-of-check-to-time-of-use: validate a file, then have it swapped before use.
• Dirty COW exploited a Linux kernel copy-on-write race to gain root for nearly a decade of kernels.
• Fixes are structural — atomic operations and locks — not input validation.