Gradle is a build automation tool, and its native-platform tool provides Java bindings for native APIs. When resolving dependencies in versions before 9.3.0, some exceptions were not treated as fatal errors and would not cause a repository to be disabled. If a build encountered one of these exceptions, Gradle would continue to the next repository in the list and potentially resolve dependencies from a different repository.

If a Gradle build used an unresolvable host name, Gradle would continue to work as long as all dependencies could be resolved from another repository. An unresolvable host name could be caused by allowing a repository's domain name registration to lapse or typo-ing the real domain name. This behavior could allow an attacker to register a service under the host name used by the build and serve malicious artifacts.

The attack requires the repository to be listed before others in the build configuration. Gradle has introduced a change in behavior in Gradle 9.3.0 to stop searching other repositories when encountering these errors.