Golang data races to break memory safety

Go is becoming more and more popular as a programming language and getting more scrutiny from a security point of view. You might remember my heap corruption during garbage collection post. A few days ago Scott Piper wrote Looking for security trouble spots in Go code, an interesting read.

I'd like to expand on a topic I've researched a few months ago after discussing with Dmitry Vyukov (ASAN, TSAN, core Go contributor). He mentioned once on the public Go mailing list that you can break the memory safety of Go with data races, and it piqued my interest so we'll explore that in this post with some exploits.

Before I start, it's important to realize that the Go team knows about this: see Russ Cox detailed blog post Off to the Races.