Race conditions in real life

You have now learned about the concept of race conditions, how they are caused in concurrent systems, and how to effectively prevent them. In this section, we will provide an overarching view of how race conditions can occur in real-life examples, within the various sub-fields of computer science. Specifically, we will be discussing the topics of security, file management, and networking.

Security

Concurrent programming can have significant implications in terms of the security of the system in question. Recall that a race condition arises between the process of reading and altering the data of a resource; a race condition in an authenticating system can cause the corruption of data between the time of check (when the credentials of an agent are checked) and the time of use (when the agent can utilize the resource). This problem is also known as a Time-Of-Check-To-Time-Of-Use (TOCTTOU) bug, which is undoubtedly detrimental to security systems.

Careless protection...