https://www.secdev.uk/blog/tags/lock-free/ Recent content in Lock-Free on guy@secdev.uk Hugo en-gb Guy Dixon | guy@secdev.uk Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.secdev.uk/blog/technology/2026-05-09-concurrency-bugs-mutexes-atomics-lock-free/ Sat, 09 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://www.secdev.uk/blog/technology/2026-05-09-concurrency-bugs-mutexes-atomics-lock-free/ <p>Concurrency bugs are, hands down, the hardest defects to find, reproduce, and fix. They hide behind timing windows, disappear the moment you attach a debugger, and come roaring back under production load. In this post, I want to go beyond basic race conditions and dig into the subtle pitfalls of mutexes, atomic operations, and lock-free data structures, the tools developers reach for when they think they're writing safe concurrent code. The more I researched these patterns, the more I realised these tools create a false sense of security that can be worse than having no synchronization at all.</p>