By default, Artifactory allows anonymous access to CocoaPods repositories. This is defined under Security | General Configuration. For details please refer to Allow Anonymous Access.
If you want to be able to trace how users interact with your repositories you need to uncheck the Allow Anonymous Access setting. This means that users will be required to enter their username and password.
Unfortunately, the pod command line tool does not support authentication against http endpoints. The cocoapods-art plugin solves this by forcing curl (which pod uses for all http requests) to use the .netrc file:
.netrc file example
machine art-prod.company.com login admin password password
Since Artifactory also supports basic authentication using your API Key you could use that instead of your password:
.netrc file using your API key
machine art-prod.company.com login admin password AKCp2TfQM58F8FTkXo8qSJ8NymwJivmagefBqoJeEBQLSHCZusEH6Z2dmhS1siSxZTHoPPyUW
Use an encrypted password
We recommend using an encrypted password instead of clear-text. For details, please refer to Centrally Secure Passwords.