For staging and test environments, follow this rule. For production setups where you have multiple Rails servers that need to connect to memcached, use the private IP of the server. This is something like When you start memcached, use --listen Disable UDP.
It is enabled by default. To disable UDP, use -U 0 when starting memcached. Mitigates forced browsing attacks. Mitigates forced browsing attacks due to developers forgetting to require authorization in some controller actions. When using DB records associated to users to populate select boxes, radio buttons or checkboxes, instead of querying by association user.
See additional details and sample code. Improves readability and maintainability of authorization policies. If possible, assign "random" names to uploaded files when storing them in the OS. If not possible, whitelist acceptable characters.
It is safer to deny uploads with invalid characters in the filenames than to attempt to sanitize them. Mitigates Directory Traversal Attacks such as attempting to overwrite system files by uploading files with names like.. Avoid using libraries such as ImageMagick to process images and videos on your server.
If using paperclip gem with imagemagick for file upload and processing, make sure: Imagemagick policies are suited for your environment to avoid exploits like pixel flood attack. Content spoofing is handled manually since it fails in scenarios like Process uploaded files asynchronously. If not possible, implement per-client rate limiting. Validate files before processing. Mitigates DoS Attacks such as image bombs. Validating file extensions without checking their media types is not enough as attackers may disguise malicious files by changing their extensions.
Mitigates the upload of dangerous file formats such as shell or Ruby scripts. Limit file size. Mitigates against DoS attacks involving the upload of very large files.
Consider uploading directly from the client browser to S3 or a similar cloud storage service. Mitigates multiple security issues by keeping uploaded files on a separate server than your Rails application. If allowing uploads of malware-prone files e.
If possible, use a third party service to scan them outside your server. Mitigates server infection mostly in Windows servers and serving infected files to other users.
If allowing upload of archives such as zip, rar, and gz, validate the target path, estimated unzip size and media types of compressed files before unzipping. File Downloads Do not allow downloading of user-submitted filenames and paths. If not possible, use a whitelist of permitted filenames and paths. Mitigates the exploitation of directory traversal vulnerabilities to download sensitive files. Do not use GET requests to alter the state of resources.
Mitigates CSRF attacks. Enable it by setting config. For example, you want to upload a file using AJAX request and send it to the other app. The receiving side should specify a whitelist of domains that are allowed to make those requests. There are few HTTP headers that control that. Resources: Security issues solutions in RoR Sensitive Data Exposure If possible, avoid storing sensitive data such as credit cards, tax IDs and third-party authentication credentials in your application.
Do not log sensitive data such as passwords and credit card numbers. You may include parameters that hold sensitive data in config. Prevents plain-text storage of sensitive data in log files. HTML comments are viewable to clients and should not contain details that can be useful to attackers. Avoids exposure of implementation details. Consider using slugs A. Prevents leakage of attribute values used to generate the slugs. For instance, visiting www. If you need to set config. Prevents leakage of exceptions and other information that should only be accessible to developers.
Place them within a group :development, :test do block in the Gemfile. It's also added to. Use a flat format which means you don't have to put development or production anymore. Upload master. You can scp or sftp the file. Upload the key to a shared directory. Shared here means shared between releases, not a shared filesystem. If you need to give a developer a copy of the key, never send it via email unless you're using encrypted emails which most of us don't!
Sanitizes HTML input, stripping all but known-safe tags and attributes. All special characters will be escaped. Whenever you render anything that is submitted to your Ruby on Rails application via users, such as for example comments, remember to sanitize it via dedicated helper provided in the framework.
That's the one that's prevented by Ruby on Rails fully out of the box if you follow its conventions, but let's see what it actually means. Those tokens are sent from the frontend to the backend layer with every form submission. Ruby on Rails comes super-prepared for securing the users' sessions and covers it in great detail in its Security Guide. There's a lot happening out of the box, but whenever configuring it, use the official guidelines as your implementation reference, as those attacks are super-dangerous.
It, for good reasons, became so popular, that there are multiple trusted providers with whom you can simply obtain the SSL Certificate completely for free - such as for example Let's Encrypt. In most cases, excluding internal services communication, this is a very much desired behavior in the secure Ruby on Rails application.
Now that we have reviewed what comes security-wise out of the box in Ruby on Rails, let us see what does not, yet is still universally implementable for almost any web application. Authentication is the act of proving an assertion, such as the identity of a computer system user.
Nowadays most of the web applications provide a way for anybody to sign up to them, and in turn, become him or herself in its domain. As opposed to the real world where we can physically look at somebody at the counter, in the virtual world it is very easy to impersonate someone else and do something more or less harmful on his or her behalf. If you are looking for a short answer to this massive subject, it breaks down to one simple advice. If you are building your first Rails application, we recommend you do not use Devise.
Yes, it is good to understand all that happens under the hood, but learning by doing beats implementing it yourself. However, if you are working on a solution that is supposed to work on an actual production environment, it is good to start with some other resources first, in order to fully understand the complex authentication process. This will hopefully make you understand how complex is the process of implementing the authentication in general, as well as in Ruby on Rails.
If you are a junior developer who has just started a new job and got the task of implementing the authentication all by yourself, start looking for a new one. If you are a senior developer looking for a resource to send for a junior developer tasked by you to implement the authentication all by himself, please, change the industry.
With those first two high-level security measures in place, let's move on to those that you can implement in the actual code. One of the measures that are a must-have for Ruby on Rails secure user authentication is not storing an actual password in the database.
Adds methods to set and authenticate against a BCrypt password. Where XXX is the attribute name of your desired password. It requires the bcrypt gem to work and as you can see an additional database column for whatever AR model you want to authenticate.
The bcrypt Ruby gem provides a simple wrapper for safely handling passwords. The most popular choice for handling a complex Ruby on Rails authentication process in a secure manner is the aforementioned Devise gem. Devise is a very sophisticated solution that is composed of ten modules. You can pick and choose those that fit your use-case.
Let's focus on those that are designed to increase the security of your Ruby on Rails application. In case of any security breach, this information can help you or even your users to review if their latest activity in your Ruby on Rails application was, in fact, theirs, and not someone else's. The next super important module that helps to prevent impersonating users of your Ruby on Rails application is called Timeoutable and it handles sessions expiration time.
The last one, Lockable , allows us to lock an account after a given amount of unsuccessful login attempts. It is later possible to unlock it via an email, or after a specified time period. This way users of your Ruby on Rails application get notified anytime their account's email or password is changed. If you want to be super equipped for debugging of potential security breaches, you can consider using AuthTrail on top of Trackable.
This gem creates a new ActiveRecord model, called LoginActivity , that describes in a great detail every login attempt via your Ruby on Rails application users.
Having it in place, you can achieve functionality similar to this one provided by Google, among many. This gives your users an overview of their login history, which can potentially alert them on any unexpected activity on their accounts.
It is an effective mechanism that helps to determine if any of the requests are generated by a bot or a human. Devise gem is not the only one available for authentication in the Ruby on Rails world, yet it is truly the most popular one. That said, it is worth checking out what alternatives for safe and secure authentication options an open-sourced world gives us for the Ruby on Rails framework. In order to not repeat something that's already doing a great job with comparing those libraries, I encourage you to visit the Awesome Ruby Devise alternatives listing.
There is a total of 15 solutions for the secure Ruby on Rails authentication and users' accounts management. Before we get to the matter of secure Ruby on Rails authorization techniques, it is important to understand the difference between Authentication and Authorization.
Michael is a budding Cybersecurity Engineer and a technical writer based in Ghana, Africa. Codementor and its third-party tools use cookies to gather statistics and offer you personalized content and experience. Read about how we use cookies and how to withdraw your consent in our Cookie Policy. If you continue to use this site, you consent to our use of cookies. Please accept our cookies! Mobile App Programming.
React Native. Programming Language. Machine Learning. Game Programming. Rasberry Pi. Selenium WebDriver. Unity 3D. Visual Studio. Programming Tutors. Computer Science. Receive New Tutorials. Ruby on Rails. Brief Overview of Ruby on Rails Ruby on Rails is simply a web framework for building web applications in Ruby, and the framework helps web developers to secure Ruby application. Convention over Configuration : This principle should tell us that Rails is simply an opinionated framework.
Devise It is a popular authentication solution for applications in Rails. If a user is not yet signed in, it returns nil. Content Security Policy — This security header helps prevent cross-site scripting attacks against applications.
Wrapping up Finally, there are many resources detailing other specific mechanisms to minimize and prevent injection attacks, redirection, and hijacking. Write for Us. You should log all authentication-related actions, such as logins, logouts, password changes, failed login attempts, and so on.
Remember that all sensitive data that you log should be encrypted. The Devise gem has a special Trackable module that logs sign-ins, timestamps, and IP addresses. You can also consider the smart reCAPTHA service from Google that won't annoy your users, as it's actually invisible to human users, so they won't even notice the service.
This simple hacking technique is called a brute-force attack, and works like this: an attacker tries to supply an email address which is usually the login and password repeatedly in order to find the right combination. People's emails are rather easy to get, while passwords are most often simple to guess. Very often, applications reveal some sensitive information even in the case of failed authentication. Once a valid email address has been found, an attacker will then be able to either attempt guessing the password or try recovering it via the forgot password page.
For even better web application protection, consider blocking accounts with multiple failed login attempts. In this case, the affected user will receive an email message with detailed instructions on what to do next to unblock the account. Brute-forcing isn't the only way to hijack an account. An attacker may alternatively steal a session cookie of a victim and in this way attempt to modify account credentials. The best way to fend off this type of attack is to protect the forgot password page from cross-site request forgery CSRF and require the password prior to changing any sensitive information.
Protecting your application against these attacks is highly recommended, and we will tell more about these particular vulnerabilities a bit later. Unlike authentication, which checks whether users are who they claim to be, authorization determines what actions an authenticated user has permission to perform within your application.
Authorization vulnerabilities may lead to data tampering, disclosure of sensitive information, and abuse of privileges. Remember that you need to ensure the security of both frontend and backend data and systems in your app. There are several important points to consider when designing your app with regard to authorization.
First of all, you should use multiple gatekeepers, as a single one might fail. Secondly, your application should be properly and securely authorized in the database. Thirdly, access to system-level resources should be restricted.
The CanCanCan authorization library for Ruby 2. This gem will help you choose what resources a user has access to. Pundit is another popular authorization gem used by many Ruby developers.
This library uses simple Ruby objects to manage access rules. Pundit is usually chosen for building large applications as the Pundit code is skinny and quite easy to read. Design your app in compliance with the so-called "least privilege" model, which says that a user should not be able to edit, add, or delete any data in the critical database unless he or she is specifically assigned to do so. Do not leave any loopholes in access rights. Your applications users must not be able to access unauthorized pages by simply entering the URL, for instance.
Thoroughly test your application for authorization vulnerabilities. You must be sure that no unauthorized access is possible. How does an application know that a request comes from the same user who has just logged in? Thanks to the session. Rails automatically creates a new session generating a random session id when a new user accesses your application. This session id is sent from the server app to the client and vice versa in a cookie.
Session management is an application-level responsibility, and you should provide the security of sessions in your application. There are four major attacks aimed at session ids: fixation, prediction, brute-forcing, and interception. Session management should never be neglected.
There are several main precautions you should take to make your application secure in this respect:. As of today, brute-forcing a session is impossible in the latest Ruby on Rails versions.
Every session id is a byte long hash value that is impossible to guess. However, this kind of attack was possible in the past, when the range of values in a session id was limited. A session hijacking attack is possible when an attacker steals a cookie that contains a session id. An attacker may try sniffing cookies on an insecure network. Once a cookie is stolen, an attacker can access an application on behalf of the victim.
To prevent session hijacking, you should use SSL connections for all pages of the website. A session fixation attack involves fixing a victim's session id so it is known to the attacker. In short, an attacker creates a valid session in the targeted application and takes the session id from the response.
Then, the attacker forces the victim's web browser to use this session id with the help of XSS or by sending numerous HTTP requests in parallel :.
There's a simple way to prevent a session fixation: a new session identifier must be issued after each successful sign-in. This is another place where the Devise gem will be extremely helpful, as it can automatically expire sessions upon sign-in and sign-out.
CookieStore has been the default session data storage since Rails 2. It saves a session data hash directly in a cookie, so a server can retrieve the session data hash without a need for a session id. This makes an application work really fast, but also makes it vulnerable to so-called replay attacks. A typical replay attack works as follows: a malicious user registers on some website that allows them to make purchases; this user has a certain credit i. At this point, the attacker copies the cookie value, then buys something and receives a new, lower credit value and consequently a new cookie.
Finally, the attacker replaces the new cookie with the old one, restoring the initial credit. This allows a user to make a purchase without actually paying for it. There's a simple way to prevent replay attacks, however: never store this kind of data in a session.
Instead, store credits in the database. Application developers should be thoughtful about data and input validation to avoid really serious threats, such as SQL injection attacks, XSS, etc. Proper input validation will make your app well-protected against the most dangerous vulnerabilities.
Input validation attacks happen when an attacker succeeds at "injecting" malicious code into certain open parameters in your application. The injection may be into a URL, a header, a cookie, a script, or something else.
Cross-site scripting is one of the most dangerous vulnerabilities in applications, and developers should apply their best efforts to fend off these attacks.
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