Building Secure Software: How to Avoid Security Problems the Right Way

9. Race Conditions

“O let not Time deceive you,You cannot conquer Time.In the burrows of the NightmareWhere Justice naked is,Time watches from the shadowAnd coughs when you would kiss.”

—W. H. AUDEN“AS I WALKED OUT ONE EVENING”

Race conditions are among the most common classes of bugs found in deployed software. They are only possible in environments in which there are multiple threads or processes occurring at once that may potentially interact (or some other form of asynchronous processing, such as with UNIX signals). People who have experience with multithread programming have almost certainly had to deal with race conditions, regardless of whether they know the term. Race conditions are a horrible problem because a program that seems to ...