Back in the day I was still a kid and thought it was pretty cool to see and talk to people all over the world. There is one thing that is bothering me. I have this memory that sometimes, after I had just been on the app and went back to my Facebook homepage, I was suddenly logged into a random Facebook account from a person I had never heard of before. As a kid, that felt really illegal and scared me.
Now, many years later, I am wondering whether this memory is something which really happened or which I made up. It seems very unlikely you could get logged in as another user (without entering any credentials) on a platform like Facebook. However, I do believe it is a real memory.
My question is the following one: could this memory be real and if so, what did Facebook do wrong?
Servers have to keep track of which clients are logged into which users, usually via a session token. Memory corruption or a race condition can cause one token to be associated with another user.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/12/25/steam-is-...