Exploitation of race condition vulnerabilities

Race conditions have caused quite a few issues and privilege escalation attacks on the Android platform; many of them allowing malicious attackers to gain root privileges.

Essentially, race conditions are caused by the lack of enforced mutual exclusion when a process on a multithreaded (a platform where more than one process is allowed to run concurrently) system that uses preemptive process scheduling. Preemptive scheduling allows a task scheduler to interrupt a thread or running process preemptively, meaning without first waiting for the task to be ready for interruption. This enables race conditions because often developers don't enable applications to operate in a way that accommodates arbitrary and unpredictable interrupts from the process scheduler; as a result, processes that rely on access to potentially shared resources like files, environment variables, or data structures in shared memory are always "racing" to get first and exclusive...