Advanced Infrastructure Penetration Testing

Race conditions

Programming with threads is not an easy mission when it comes to scheduling. The bug that occurs when many threads are racing to change the same data structure is named race conditions. In other words, it happens when two threats are trying to do the same job. To avoid race conditions, an atomic operation is needed. Thus, when an operation is started, it cannot be stopped or interrupted. Linux provides a solution named Mutex, which is the abbreviation of mutual exclusion object. Like its name indicates, mutexes are locks to prevent threads to perform simultaneously. The Dirty Cow (CVE-2016-5195) is a privilege escalation exploit found in Linux kernel based on race conditions. To download the exploit, you can check this GitHub ...