Starbucks race conditions
On May 21st, 2015, a researcher from the Sakuruty group published a bug about a race condition in Starbucks' payment module.
To understand this vulnerability, let me explain what a race condition is. In the computer science, there are shared resources, for example, the memory, data, and environmental variables. So, what happens if process A wants to access the same resource as process B? Well, the first process that accesses it will use it, but not necessarily this resource will be blocked—it could be used at the same time by the other process with unexpected results.
Researchers from Sakurity bought three Starbucks' cards, and registered them in the web application. This application had the feature of being able ...
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