Concurrency Correctness

Concurrency Correctness (CWE-833, CWE-820, CWE-667)

What this checks

Concurrency bugs that read clean in isolation but produce deadlocks, lost wakeups, or data races in production. Race detectors catch triggered races but not structural mistakes. Flags local patterns: lock-around-blocking-call, lock-order in nested acquires, atomic memory order, double-checked locking. Not a replacement for whole-program ownership analysis (borrow checker, lockdep, model checking).

Vulnerable patterns

• Lock held across a blocking operation — await, sleep, blocking I/O, or a blocking channel send — so every other waiter blocks on the slow thing
• Inconsistent lock order across call sites — one path acquires (L1, L2), another acquires (L2, L1), producing classic AB-BA deadlock
• Recursive acquisition of a non-recursive mutex on the same thread
• Atomic flag published with relaxed ordering where acquire/release is required — the reader can observe the flag set before the writer's payload writes are visible
• Double-checked locking where the outer read of the published pointer or flag uses no acquire barrier
• Acquiring a lock and then sending on an unbuffered channel whose receiver needs the same lock to make progress
• Async cancellation that interrupts a critical section without restoring invariants

Fix immediately

Flag the vulnerable code, explain the risk, and suggest a fix establishing these properties. Translate to the concurrency primitives of the audited file — use that language's documented lock, atomic, once-cell, and channel APIs; do not import a recipe from a different language.

1. No blocking operation inside a held lock. Snapshot whatever state is needed under the lock, release the lock, then perform the I/O, await, or sleep on the snapshot. The critical section stays bounded by CPU work only.
2. Lock order is canonical and total. Every code path that acquires two or more locks acquires them in the same sequence — sorted by address, by name, or via a scoped/multi-lock primitive that handles ordering. Document the ordering rule near the lock declarations.
3. Memory ordering on atomics matches the synchronization need. Use acquire on the read and release on the write whenever an atomic publishes a pointer, flag, or sequence that the reader will then dereference. Relaxed ordering is reserved for counters and statistics where no other state depends on the value.
4. Lazy initialization uses a primitive that is correct by construction — a one-shot init helper, a function-local static where the language guarantees thread-safe initialization, or an atomic with explicit acquire/release on both the outer and inner reads. Hand-rolled double-checked locking without a barrier is not acceptable.
5. Non-recursive mutexes are never re-entered on the same thread. When a recursive call site genuinely needs to take the lock again, use the recursive variant explicitly.

Verification

Criteria apply only to constructs the audited file actually contains; mark inapplicable bullets N/A rather than skipping silently.

• No await, sleep, blocking I/O, or blocking channel send appears inside a held-lock scope
• When a function acquires two or more locks, the order is total — every code path that holds both acquires them in the same sequence
• Every relaxed-ordered atomic operation is paired with a comment explaining why relaxed is sufficient (e.g. statistics counter, not a synchronization flag)
• Lazy initialization uses a once-helper, a thread-safe function-local static, or an atomic with explicit acquire/release on both reads — not hand-rolled double-checked locking without a barrier
• No recursive lock attempt on a non-recursive mutex

References

• CWE-833 (Deadlock)
• CWE-820 (Missing Synchronization)
• CWE-667 (Improper Locking)
• CWE-362 (Race Condition)