AOSSIE-Org / AOSSIE-Org/PictoPy

BUG: Critical Race Condition in Sync Microservice Watcher Initialization

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#1,166 5 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee Claimed by @faizavk View on GitHub
backend bug
Dominant language
Python
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283
Forks
679
Avg merge
7d 2h
Merged PRs (30d)
3

Description

### Is there an existing issue for this?

- [x] I have searched the existing issues

### What happened?

**Bug Description:**
A Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use (TOCTOU) race condition exists in sync-microservice/app/utils/watcher.py. This vulnerability allows multiple background watcher threads to be spawned simultaneously, which can lead to duplicated sync events, corrupted global state, and memory leaks.

**Root Cause:** The global variables tracking the watcher state (watcher_thread, watched_folders, folder_id_map) are mutated across asynchronous API requests without thread synchronization (e.g., no threading.Lock()).

Because the startup process involves I/O operations (database and filesystem checks) that yield the Python GIL, if the /start endpoint receives concurrent requests, both requests can bypass the watcher_util_is_watcher_running() check before the first request has a chance to assign the watcher_thread variable. This results in multiple watchfiles processes being initialized and running concurrently over the same directories.

**Proposed Fix**
To enforce thread safety, I propose introducing a global threading.Lock() (e.g., state_lock = threading.Lock()). We can then wrap the critical sections inside watcher_util_start_folder_watcher, watcher_util_stop_folder_watcher, and watcher_util_restart_folder_watcher using a with state_lock: context manager. This will guarantee atomic operations on the global watcher state and completely prevent duplicate thread creation.

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