Building Twilio Apps on Rails: Security, MMS and Delivery Receipts

https://www.twilio.com/blog/2014/10/twilio-on-rails-part-2-rails-4-app-sending-sms-mms.html

by crabasa • 12 years ago

2 2 12 years ago

patio11• 12 years ago

Another option for securing Twilio apps is to a) use HTTPS between your server and Twilio, which you always want to do anyway and then b) use a shared secret to validate that the HTTP client your app is talking to is actually Twilio.

I do this, partially because it was easy to implement and partially because independently developed message signing and verification can be... finnicky. I have no particular reason to not trust Twilio's generated signatures, but didn't want a sudden confusion about e.g. ordering parameters to wake me up at 3 AM when it broke the system. Or worse, not wake me up at 3 AM when it broke the system.

RobSpectre• 12 years ago

Totally fair solution. Some folks like to roll their own, some folks like to use ours. Important bit is the app is validating the data is sending and receiving.

Param ordering changes in your framework can definitely hit. I've caught similar bugs when upgrading frameworks before hitting production with some validation unit tests. Here is an example if that is helpful: https://github.com/RobSpectre/Twilio-Hackpack-for-Heroku-and...

Building Twilio Apps on Rails: Security, MMS and Delivery Receipts

Related Stories