Thread management in a Web application is forbidden in some circumstances and is always highly error prone.
Thread management in a web application is forbidden by the J2EE standard in some circumstances and is always highly error prone. Managing threads is difficult and is likely to interfere in unpredictable ways with the behavior of the application container. Even without interfering with the container, thread management usually leads to bugs that are hard to detect and diagnose like deadlock, race conditions, and other synchronization errors.

Primary

Implementation

Other
Quality Degradation

Automated Static Analysis
Automated static analysis, commonly referred to as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), can find some instances of this weakness by analyzing source code (or binary/compiled code) without having to execute it. Typically, this is done by building a model of data flow and control flow, then searching for potentially-vulnerable patterns that connect "sources" (origins of input) with "sinks" (destinations where the data interacts with external components, a lower layer such as the OS, etc.)
High

Architecture and Design
For EJB, use framework approaches for parallel execution, instead of using threads.

In the following example, a new Thread object is created and invoked directly from within the body of a doGet() method in a Java servlet.

public void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response) throws ServletException, IOException {

// Perform servlet tasks.
...

// Create a new thread to handle background processing.
Runnable r = new Runnable() {
public void run() {

// Process and store request statistics.
...
}
};
new Thread(r).start();
}

System Process

J2EE Bad Practices: Threads

SFP3
Use of an improper API

Allowed
This CWE entry is at the Variant level of abstraction, which is a preferred level of abstraction for mapping to the root causes of vulnerabilities.
Carefully read both the name and description to ensure that this mapping is an appropriate fit. Do not try to 'force' a mapping to a lower-level Base/Variant simply to comply with this preferred level of abstraction.

7 Pernicious Kingdoms
2006-07-19
Draft 3
2006-07-19

Sean Eidemiller
Cigital
2008-07-01
added/updated demonstrative examples

Eric Dalci
Cigital
2008-07-01
updated Time_of_Introduction

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2008-09-08
updated Relationships, Other_Notes, Taxonomy_Mappings

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2010-12-13
updated Description, Other_Notes, Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2011-06-01
updated Common_Consequences

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2011-06-27
updated Common_Consequences

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2012-05-11
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2012-10-30
updated Potential_Mitigations

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2014-07-30
updated Relationships, Taxonomy_Mappings

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2017-11-08
updated Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2020-02-24
updated References, Relationships

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2023-04-27
updated Detection_Factors, Relationships, Time_of_Introduction

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2023-06-29
updated Mapping_Notes

CWE Content Team
MITRE
2025-12-11
4.19
2025-12-11
updated Applicable_Platforms, Weakness_Ordinalities

J2EE Bad Practices: Threads
J2EE Bad Practices: Use of Threads