Don't find out about Ruby vulnerabilities through Hacker News and Twitter

by phillmv • 13 years ago

92 36 13 years ago

phillmv6• 13 years ago

Hey! We built this as an itch scratcher - something that will only notify us about security updates. We've been working on this for a couple weeks now, and we think other people might find it useful.

We're still in beta and adding some polish, so please let us know if something breaks. Also, it's possible we may run up against the GitHub API rate limit, so bear with us if we turn off new user signups.

Thanks!,

ConstantineXVI• 13 years ago

Seems it'd be much more useful to be able to have a commit hook POST the app's Gemfile to your service instead of doing everything via GitHub, unless there's something I'm missing?

phillmv6• 13 years ago

I agree.

If you login through github and enable notifications, we install a post-receive hook.

For non github projects… we plan on eventually supporting that, but GitHub was an easy-lowest-common-denominator.

fla• 13 years ago

Defenately something uselful I would pay for. Unfortunately I can't let you access my private repos. Any alternative ?

bryanthompson• 13 years ago

Exactly what stopped me. I'd upload my Gemfile.locks, but I had to bail out at the github login screen.

phillmv6• 13 years ago

We're planning on releasing a gem so you can use it without github.

If you're interested, add your email through the "I don't use GitHub" link on the front page, and we'll let you know when it's ready :).

kmfrk3• 13 years ago

How do you detect when something's a security update - and not just an incremental patch or feature addition?

tantalor• 13 years ago

Very interesting, but why is it ruby specific? What about packages vulnerabilities in other languages? Surely you can parse Javascript and Python requirement files as well, the concept is no different.

endtwist2• 13 years ago

(Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.)

BundleScout[1] does this for other languages, including Node.js and Python--and of course Ruby Gems. We don't have Github integration yet, but you can simply upload your requirements file (which, it seems, some people would rather do anyway).

[1] https://bundlescout.com

pulledpork• 13 years ago

This is very cool. I'm not a ruby dev but just coming into this thread and finding out there are alternatives for my languages is fantastic.

Congrats on a cool product and I'm glad it was posted here.

kmfrk3• 13 years ago

The design is gorgeous. A few observations:

1. When I upload a requirements.txt file, let me just pick 5 packages from the file instead of telling me I have to upgrade to use it.

2. Why is Django listed as the old version 1.3.7 in my dash?

3. You have a Twitter account, but there appears to be no link on your website that I could spot.

phillmv6• 13 years ago

So, we're only interested in sending security notices. We don't care about being notified about every dependency out there.

As a result, the hard part is collecting info on vulnerable dependencies. We solved this problem for Ruby by… co-maintaining an open source database https://github.com/rubysec/ruby-advisory-db/ – which everyone is free to use.

We don't have the resources to do this for every community :).

carlio• 13 years ago

I wrote http://getshrubbery.com with a friend to do this for python packages. It's still a bit beta-ish but it works. It also notifies of all updates, not just security ones.

bradleyland• 13 years ago

Congrats on launching guys, but I'm going to be really honest here. The requirement that I provide access to my Github repos like this is a deal breaker. For a security related product, this creates a huge attack surface and audit requirement.

From a security standpoint, what you want to do is less important than what you can do, and the access controls you use currently -- public or public + private -- just aren't fine grained enough.

ryanbrunner• 13 years ago

I think that's how GitHub OAuth works though. As far as I know, you can't ask for access to a specific repository for an account, just access to private repositories in general.

You could probably hack around it by creating an integration account that only has access to the repositories that you want to integrate. If you're asking for only access to the Gemfile and not the repository, that's far outside the security model of GitHub, and even Git.

Maybe a good alternative for people security conscious would be a manual Gemfile upload?

phillmv6• 13 years ago

>For a security related product, this creates a huge attack surface and audit requirement.

We agree. We spent a lot of time debating this.

We originally set out to build a gem, but realized it was so much easier to use through GitHub. Unfortunately, we can't provide more granular access due to what the API gives us.

We plan on eventually releasing said gem, as noted in the "I don't use github" link on the front page :).

mrgreenfur• 13 years ago

What about a functionality where I can upload my gemfile when I deploy? I deploy, cap sends you my gemfile and you notify me.

param• 13 years ago

How is this better than brakeman? (http://brakemanscanner.org/) Seems like they only pretty much check your gem dependencies while brakeman also does static code analysis and points out potential sql injection spots etc...

InAnEmergency• 13 years ago

Brakeman will not check all gem dependencies and is not a general-purpose gem dependency security checker... bundler-audit will probably end up being the de facto tool for that: https://github.com/postmodern/bundler-audit

re_todd• 13 years ago

Yeah, brakeman is awesome, here is a railscast for anyone interested: http://railscasts.com/episodes/358-brakeman

boonedocks• 13 years ago

Brakeman is great. I think it should check the Gemfile also. Seems like a good place for it. The opinion is mixed though.

https://github.com/presidentbeef/brakeman/issues/276

A complementary command-line tool would be fine too.

existentialmutt• 13 years ago

Where do you guys find out about security vulnerabilities?

ontoillogical2• 13 years ago

(I'm the other person responsible for gemcanary)

Having a record of all the security vulnerabilities that affect the Ruby community is important. To that end, we help maintain https://github.com/rubysec/ruby-advisory-db/ which is free for anyone to use or contribute to.

camus• 13 years ago

Oh yeah ,now i get it , it is like a canary in a coal mine !!! great project guys .

habosa• 13 years ago

This is really well done, thanks! I read HN every day and I thought I was fairly up to date after the last Rails security scramble but you guys pointed out a few more gems I need to update/remove. Integration was seamless and I got the information I came for in less than 2 minutes.

pnathan• 13 years ago

I think this is the best headline/page I've read for a long time.

It neatly states an obvious problem in the headline, then on landing, proposes a service to solve the problem that we know exists. If I had a ruby system, I'd be on this like, well, frosting on a cupcake. Mmmmm, cupcakes. :)

throwawayG9• 13 years ago

We have this for PHP: https://security.sensiolabs.org/

You should consider building something similar.

dguido2• 13 years ago

Postmodern wrote a gem to do this entirely on your own, no giving away access to your Github repositories necessary. Check out bundle-audit:

https://github.com/postmodern/bundler-audit

ontoillogical2• 13 years ago

We're actually collaborating with him on the advisory database that gemcanary and bundler-audit both use. It's free and open for anyone to use.

Check it out: https://github.com/rubysec/ruby-advisory-db

dguido2• 13 years ago

Cool, the whole system of projects you guys are working on look exciting. Glad that Ruby is finally getting its act together a little bit.

gravis• 13 years ago

I'm personally using https://gemnasium.com, and very happy with it

Don't find out about Ruby vulnerabilities through Hacker News and Twitter

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