- What is Race condition ?
2. impact of Race Condition ?
3. Detailed POC of Race condition ?
4. Mitigation of Race Conditions ?
- Race condition ?
Race condition vulnerability is a type of software or system flaw that arises when the program’s behavior depends on the timing of events or processes. It occurs in concurrent or multi-threaded environments when multiple threads or processes access shared resources, like variables, files, or data structures, without proper synchronization or coordination. The vulnerability arises from the unpredictable order in which these threads or processes execute, leading to unintended and potentially harmful consequences.
2. impact ?
Race condition vulnerabilities can have significant and wide-ranging impacts on software and systems:
- Data Corruption: One of the most common and detrimental consequences of race conditions is data corruption. When multiple threads or processes attempt to read and modify shared data simultaneously without proper synchronization, data integrity can be compromised, leading to incorrect, incomplete, or inconsistent data.
- Security Risks: Exploiting race conditions, malicious actors can gain unauthorized access to sensitive resources, escalate their privileges, or execute arbitrary code, posing a severe security threat.
- System Crashes: Uncontrolled concurrent access to critical resources can lead to system instability and crashes, disrupting services and causing downtime.
- Unpredictable Behavior: Race conditions make a program’s behavior unpredictable, making it challenging to diagnose and resolve issues, which can affect the user experience and data integrity.
- Privilege Escalation: By exploiting race conditions, malicious actors can escalate their privileges within a system. Through strategic manipulation of their actions, they can gain higher access rights, potentially leading to unauthorized system control.
- Financial Loss: Race conditions can lead to financial losses, particularly in applications involving financial transactions or critical data, as inconsistent or erroneous data can result in costly errors.
3. Detailed POC …..!
Alright, everyone! Let’s start our detailed proof of concept (POC) on how I discovered the race condition on a bug bounty platform.
lets assume the domain i.e. example.com
Interestingly, I didn’t find any P1 bugs within this scope. After spending some time on it, I noticed there is an “AI content creation” option available on this domain.
Here, we can observe that the above image shows a free trial version of an AI content creator with a limited number of uses. They only provide 10 chances to use this AI chat.
However, I attempted to overcome this usage limit, and here’s what I did.
Now, observe here: I’ve already used 8 out of the 10 chances. That means we only have 2 chances left.
Capture the request in Burp Suite before forwarding it to the server. Just create a group of requests and click on send. Here, we see that the group of requests we sent received a "201 Created" response, indicating that those requests were successfully processed.
LOL, out of the 10 chances we were given, we ended up using 33!
4. Mitigation ?
- Atomic Operations: Utilize atomic operations to ensure critical actions are performed indivisibly, reducing the chance of interleaving.
- Testing and Code Review: Conduct rigorous testing and code reviews to identify and address race condition vulnerabilities early in the development process.
- Synchronization Mechanisms: Implement locks, mutexes, or semaphores to control access to shared resources, maintaining consistency.
That's it for the day … thanks for reading ….!
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