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  1. Struts 2
  2. WW-3845

atomicity violation bugs because of misusing concurrent collections

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Details

    • Bug
    • Status: Closed
    • Major
    • Resolution: Fixed
    • 2.3.4
    • 2.3.12
    • None
    • Patch

    Description

      My name is Yu Lin. I'm a Ph.D. student in the CS department at
      UIUC. I'm currently doing research on mining Java concurrent library
      misusages. I found some misusages of ConcurrentHashMap in Struts
      2.3.4, which may result in potential atomicity violation bugs or harm
      the performance.

      The code below is a snapshot of the code in file
      core/src/main/java/org/apache/struts2/components/UIBean.java from line
      1227 to 1244

      L1227 Set<String> standardAttributes = standardAttributesMap.get(clz);
      L1228 if (standardAttributes == null)

      { L1229 standardAttributes = new HashSet<String>(); L1230 standardAttributesMap.put(clz, standardAttributes); ... L1244 }

      In the code above, an atomicity violation may occur between lines
      <1228 and 1230>. Suppose a thread T1 executes line 1227 and finds out
      the concurrent hashmap "standardAttributes" dose not contain the key
      "clz". Before it gets to execute line 1230, another thread T2 puts a
      pair <clz, v> in the concurrent hashmap "standardAttributes". Now
      thread T1 resumes execution and it will overwrite the value written by
      thread T2. Thus, the code no longer preserves the "put-if-absent"
      semantics.

      I found some similar misusages in other files:

      In
      xwork-core/src/main/java/com/opensymphony/xwork2/ognl/OgnlUtil.java,
      there are similar atomicity violations as the above code at lines 242
      and 415. Note that if we change "beanInfoCache.put" to
      "beanInfoCache.putIfAbsent" at line 415, the synchronized key word on
      "beanInfoCache" can be removed so that the performance can be improved.

      Similarly, in
      xwork-core/src/main/java/com/opensymphony/xwork2/util/LocalizedTextUtil.java,
      atomicity violations may occur at line 254, 263 and 707 (thread T2 may
      put a pair <key, value> into the map before thread T1 puts). Second,
      before thread T1 executes line 257 or 266, thread T2 may remove the
      key "key" from concurrent hashmap "bundlesMap". Thus, after T1 resumes
      execution, it will get null value at line 257 or 266, which is also an
      atomicity violation.

      Attachments

        1. struts-2.3.4.patch
          7 kB
          Yu Lin
        2. UIBean.patch
          1.0 kB
          Yanming Zhou

        Activity

          People

            lukaszlenart Lukasz Lenart
            jacklondongood Yu Lin
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              Updated:
              Resolved:

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