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Multiple Security Holes In Ruby 1.8, 1.9
ruphus13 notes a six-pack of serious vulnerabilities discovered in Ruby by a member of Apple's security team, Drew Yao. Patches are linked from the ruby-lang.org advisory. "With the following vulnerabilities, an attacker can lead to denial of service condition or execute arbitrary code... These vulnerabilities are likely to crop up in just about any average ruby web application. And by 'crop up' I mean 'crop up exploitable from trivial user-specified parameters.' It's not hard to begin imagining cases where Ruby/Rails programmers use code similar to the samples above to routinely handle user input."
That's really not the story. The story is how simple the exploits were and yet, how long it took to be discovered.
Then what is? Sun Java and Microsoft .NET have both had long histories of security patches. Python is a lot better but nothing is perfect.
At least with a Linux Python/Ruby you get the security fix within hours as part of your regular operating system update. With Java you have to download the whole thing again from Sun's site. With .NET you have to wait for patch tuesday or apply a hotfix manually.
Sam ty sig.
The real story here is how quickly the bugs were patched. I'd like to see MS respond half as fast to holes in Windows and it's attendant parts and pieces.
No. The real story here are the security bugs, precisely as described. This isn't cheerleading - to users of Ruby it really doesn't matter how fast some other imagined patch might have come out from another company for a different product. If I'm running Ruby, I need to know that these bugs exist and that patches can be applied for them.
Drop the us vs them thinking - it doesn't help is pretty much just FUD.
Cheers,
Ian
The bugs would have been there even if Apple hadn't found them. Why not thank them for improving the quality of Ruby?
Mr. Period: Nine is the one that's right by ten!
Nine: One day I will kill him. Then, I will be Ten.
How did open source fail? Someone who wasn't the original author had access to the code and found the bugs. How quickly it's found is a function of how many qualified people are looking at the code. I didn't RTFA, but presumably Drew Yao, a member of the security team, was security auditing the code. This activity would have been much harder to impossible with closed source code.
I'd say the system worked as advertised here.
This, IMHO, goes to show that Ruby isn't any better than the other Open Source interpreted languages. Despite what the Ruby fanboys allways claim, it is actually far less mature then, let's say, Python or PHP.
A matured, tested and established mod_ruby, unicode and a few years more in the field is what Ruby needs before I take a look at it.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
A vulnerability in an open source project was found by a third party doing a security audit of the code. The possibility to validate the source code is exactly what open source proponents claim is the reason for open source being more secure. Everybody can have a go, a thousand pairs of eyes see more than one pair, and all that. Try auditing Visual Basic 6 for comparison.
Agreed. It also usually doesn't refer to a programming language or environment. At any rate, "enterprise" applications have historically been written in a bunch of languages that don't do array bounds checking. Granted, ruby is supposed to do it, but I mean, seriously - are kids these days so spoiled by JavaScript and VB that this kind of error is a surprise and the biggest bug ever?
This activity would have been much harder to impossible with closed source code.
I'd say the system worked as advertised here.
Yup, because Microsoft certainly never have exploits such as these discovered...Actually, considering its age, Java DOESN'T have a "long" history of security patches. Java was designed by security freaks and the security both of the core language and the standard platforms is extensively vetted and tested by security professionals. Which is why you have to look long and hard for news reports of major security breaches in Java.
The Java system is considered to be an integrated whole and new releases have to pass an extensive suite of tests before they are certified. Yes, it's a royal pain in the [censored] to have to download an entire enormous new release of the runtime engine and support classes, but the upside is that you don't get the kinds of security and reliability issues that come from a mix-match-and-patch approach. There's only a small number of possible configurations to keep clean.
Case 1: the code has no bugs: "many eyes make for shallow bugs!" everyone chants.
Case 2: the code has bugs which get reported and fixed. "See, this would have taken much longer if the source was closed!" This claim is impossible to verify objectively but is stated as a fact, regardless of how trivial the bugs are.
Apple finds serious bugs in Ruby. They tell the Ruby developers. Ruby developers issue patches. That's not sensational.
MS finds a bug in Safari. They tell everyone not to use Safari. I see slight differences. :P
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I didn't say anything about Microsoft. Obviously there are, but the source is much more difficult to obtain. If the source can't be obtained, auditors must use more difficult types of testing, or just hope that the vendor did their job correctly.
My only point was that Apple would have a much more difficult time auditing, say, Office for Mac, than they would with Ruby due to the requirement for source code agreements or using more arcane methods like blackbox testing or disassembly. The same applies to Photoshop, Flash, or any other 3rd party closed-source app.
The victory here is that Ruby was improved by a 3rd party who had ready access to the source. When the source is available, this will happen much more often than when it's not.
Huh? Who lets users enter arbitrary integers to index into arrays? Or let's users submit arbitrary loops for execution? Apart from the statement quoted above, what indication is there that any of these would "crop up" in any but the most contrived circumstances?
--MarkusQ
1. If the interpreter is supposed to do it, except it then turns out it actually doesn't (or doesn't do it correctly), then yes.
2. If the problem occurs in something that is a part of the language itself, or at least part of its standard library/built-in types, or, however you want to define it, if it is in the set of stuff that everyone who has the language installed has installed, and the functionality is used in pretty much any program ever written in the language, then yes.
So, yes.
Every expression is true, for a given value of 'true'
I did some testing on an off line server, and then pushed these patches.
I am concerned about "Ruby the Platform". I have dealt with deployment and scaling issues for a few years on a customer project written in Rails + Common Lisp, and as much as I *love* coding in Ruby and Lisp, this experience has also made me appreciate "Java the platform" :-)
Was there not a recent demonstration on a 'blended threat' based on the safari bug that would execute code next time IE ran, also I beleive there is another similar method for firefox 2/3.
No, there still is a bug in IE that will run any properly named DLL on the Desktop, whether it is downloaded with the "Carpet Bomb", or by hand with any browser, download tool (incl. FTP or P2P), or moved there, or put there by fairies. And there is also a bug in Firefox that allows somebody to "steal files", which has probably to do with a certain kind of file being in its Download Folder (by default the Desktop) - again, no matter how it got there. These are bugs that need to be fixed.Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Look at almost every security advisory issued out there. "Remedy: Do not/restrict usage of X until bug is resolved".
Making this a stab at MSFT just shows you up as an Apple fanboy.
Ignoring that there is a much bigger hole in IE that the Apple bug makes a tiny bit easier to trigger shows you up as what then?Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck