trunk.cocoapods.org is the authentication server for the CoacoaPods dependency manager. Prior to commit d4fa66f49cedab449af9a56a21ab40697b9f7b97, the trunk sessions verification step could be manipulated for owner session hijacking Compromising a victim’s session will result in a full takeover of the CocoaPods trunk account. The threat actor could manipulate their pod specifications, disrupt the distribution of legitimate libraries, or cause widespread disruption within the CocoaPods ecosystem. This was patched server-side with commit d4fa66f49cedab449af9a56a21ab40697b9f7b97 in October 2023.
The product does not sufficiently enforce boundaries between the states of different sessions, causing data to be provided to, or used by, the wrong session.
Data can “bleed” from one session to another through member variables of singleton objects, such as Servlets, and objects from a shared pool. In the case of Servlets, developers sometimes do not understand that, unless a Servlet implements the SingleThreadModel interface, the Servlet is a singleton; there is only one instance of the Servlet, and that single instance is used and re-used to handle multiple requests that are processed simultaneously by different threads. A common result is that developers use Servlet member fields in such a way that one user may inadvertently see another user’s data. In other words, storing user data in Servlet member fields introduces a data access race condition.