Ruby On Rails Security Vulnerabilities

Justin collins here with a rare non release related brakeman post.

Ruby on rails security vulnerabilities.

Dot dot in a pathname. Rubyonrails ruby on rails security vulnerabilities exploits metasploit modules vulnerability statistics and list of versions e g. On august 27 2010 two days before rails 3 0 i released the first public version of my summer intern project at at t interactive. There has been a buzz around the ruby on rails community lately with discovered security vulnerabilities and subsequent updates every rails developer should be made aware.

The gems you use in your ruby on rails project may have some dangerous vulnerabilities of their own. Brakeman rails security scanner to perform static security analysis for rails applications. Rails has built in support to help developers avoid common security issues like xss and sql injection but it is still possible to introduce these vulnerabilities into ruby on rails apps. Subscribe to the rails security mailing list.

In addition to common security vulnerabilities there are other vulnerabilities more commonly associated with rails e g mass assignment. A static analysis security tool for ruby on rails called brakeman. In simple terms an sql injection attack happens whenever a malicious user manipulates request parameters in order to access database content. Cve 2009 1234 or 2010 1234 or 20101234 log in register.

Ruby on rails application security assessment services though there are dozens of ruby gems you can use there still remains the question of whether you can trust them. Ruby on rails takes web security very seriously. But it also means a clear policy on how to report vulnerabilities and receive updates when patches to those are released. Being maintained by very responsible people it implements a whole lot of security measures out of the box to prevent developers from making mistakes.

Brakeman was intended to be a stop gap solution until commercial products started supporting ruby. This means including features to protect application makers from common issues like csrf script injection sql injection and the like. The security landscape shifts and it is important to keep up to date because missing a new vulnerability can be catastrophic. Ruby on rails has been around the block for quite a while since april 2008 and has seen its fair share of security vulnerabilities.

Every web or mobile application that does sql queries over the internet are susceptible to this. You can find additional resources about rails security here.