The "they" in this case being the Rails team and not Github?

A common thread here seems to be grouping Github and Rails.

Its interesting how bring up their Terms Of Service gets discounted and the holy war just takes over. No where did I mention Rails, Ruby, community, or anything else.

Me: He broke the rules. Retort: I like plant.

Disclaimer: The actions of individuals are representative of individuals. Drawing dramatic generalizations accomplishes nothing. Yes, there are more vocal asses in every community. For every asshat there is likely 100 quiet people. Right now, I'm being an asshat.

Gee, homakov is Russian. All Russians must want to hack your site. Really? No, its a dumb generalization.

"Go looking for serious security holes in Rails? Change defaults so Rails users don't unsuspectingly open themselves up to attack? Fuck that! Let's add CoffeeScript instead. That's how I roll" - DHH*

* Not actually DHH.

"This is why I refuse to learn Ruby. I don't want to be associated with that community. "Learn Ruby if you want to be associated with a bunch of people who call themselves Rockstar Programmers.""

You refuse to learn a language due to how a project acts? Have you ever read the {open,free,net}BSD or Linux mailing lists? You're not going to make it far in software development with an attitude like that.

It's a fairly rational argument to have a preference/affinity for programming languages based on communities surrounding them. He stated his preferences, and that's perfectly fine. You might have been too quick in passing that judgement.

Unless a quantum computing breakthrough alters the way we control computers, there will never be a one-language to rule them all. We'll continue having a wide diaspora and will take evolutionary steps to bind ideas together. Preemptive and comprehensive security model might be just one of those ideas.

No it's not rational to assume a language isn't worth learning due to how some people act in fact it's ignorant. You use a tool due to it's merit not due to presumption of how everyone acts.

I'm not intimate with the Ruby community, but the quality / quantity / culture of the community surrounding a programming language seems like a reasonable consideration to me.

whoa whoa whoa

Ruby is a really cool language with some fascinating features--don't limit yourself by assuming that you also have to learn the Rails stuff.

Seriously, give it a shot in one of its more palatable forms.

> with some fascinating features

If you come from PHP or Java anyway.

yes yes yes

no new genuinely new programming ideas have happened since the 70s and 80s.

Don't be obtuse.

There's nothing obtuse about it, new programming ideas have happened since the 70s and 80s but as far as I know none of them is in Ruby, and you're basically assuming tylermenezes does not know about any of the (much older) features which did get into Ruby.

Tell that to STM. Sure most new programming languages are amalgamations of existing concepts, but new stuff does turn up from time to time.

But STM is from the 80s -- 1986 to be precise.

Indeed, github, Ruby and Rails are all different things. I do recommend approaching language/platform/tool choices form an engineering rather than a social point of view.

Don't get me wrong, though. I can see being turned off by rockstars, but you've found a language unencumbered by them?

tylermenezes: the first "closed/open" thing was done by accident, @homakove didn't reopen it. I closed the second bug as this was just kind of trolling to get attention, there was no point on keeping it open.

Not all security vulnerabilities can be protected automatically by a web framework. In many cases, frameworks provide features that developers can use themselves to secure their applications.

Example:

XSS is a common web security problem. In short, it means that putting user-originated data back on the page unescaped is unacceptable. Before Rails 3.0, the Rails approach to this problem was to provide a helper (h), which you could use to escape content that you knew to be vulnerable.

Unfortunately, many Rails users did not use this feature in all places they should have used it. As a result, many applications (Twitter included) suffered from whack-a-mole XSS vulnerabilities.

We were unable to solve this problem in the 2.x branch, because automatically escaping all text being put onto the page would be a massive breaking change and would break every app in existence.

Further, simply escaping all text would not really solve the problem. For example, the "<form>" tag generated by Rails itself should not be escaped, while any of its contents or attributes provided by the application should. Asking the user to take on the responsibility to mark Rails-generated content as not needing escaping would reintroduce the same problem we had before: people would "unescape" things too eagerly, and apps would tend to have vulnerabilities.

The solution was to release a plugin for Rails 2.3 users (rails_xss) and change the default in Rails 3. It isn't perfect: there are still cases where applications have to mark strings as "safe", and applications that have to do so often might have the same problem, but I think we did a good job, all things considered.

This case is quite similar. Rails provides all the tools necessary to have a secure application (attr_accessible is the equivalent of h), but many apps don't use it correctly (or at all). In short, a Rails security default seems to be wrong, insofar as "wrong" means that many people fail to use the security feature, causing their applications to be vulnerable.

As with the XSS feature, fixing this problem requires some thought. Simply changing the default would break a lot of applications in the wild. Like XSS, it's probably correct to do so anyway here. However, like XSS, we should make sure that we have done everything we possibly can to mitigate the additional cost associated with complying with the new default. If it's too painful, many people will overeagerly bypass the feature, reintroducing the very issue we were trying to protect them from.

In this case, I have proposed a solution that I think will mitigate a lot of the problem (https://gist.github.com/1974187), and we will likely ship it as a Rails 3.2 plugin. This will allow us to gather feedback about unexpected consequences and ensure that when we change the default for Rails 4 (which has not even shipped a prerelease yet), it actually mitigates the security problem in the vast majority of Rails applications.

Every C programmer has the tools they need to not create buffer overflows _and yet buffer overflows are abundant_.

Saying "we'll provide the tools and insist that developers use them safely and securely" is a bullshit answer, and always has been.

You're either secure by default, or not at all. In this case, not at all.

These issues need to be nipped very early on before they get too big to handle. Microsoft was stuck in this situation for many years because they had decided to favour compatibility over security. Rails now has a wide footprint on the web, and it all makes it even more important to enable it to be properly locked down.

I hope this marks a turning point in the way the Rails team think about security.

ps At least Rails no longer allows web crawlers to delete resources by issuing GET requests.

What do you think of doing it this way http://blog.ricodigo.com/blog/2012/03/04/an-alternative-to-a...?

I don't necessarily like having to have every ORM/data library have to know about this concern...

I don't like the suggestion. It enforces a 1:1 relationship between controller and model.

I'd rather have the model and the ORM be pulled apart and the model make this distinction.

Or create another class that knows how to safely pull values out of a params list and use it to create a model.

But it's bad enough that the controllers "look" like they belong to a model in default Rails generators. This creates a certain amount of laxity in programmer's thinking. It boxes their thinking in instead of letting their thinking go free.

@wycats any chance of you creating a screencast of how to tackle Rails security from your experience with Merb/Rails?

Thanks again for your hard work and being a public voice on the issue.

I think you're confusing Ruby with Rails. Flat out refusing to learn a wonderful programming language because you don't agree with it's dominant web framework is silly.