MIT Bug Finder Uncovers Flaws In Web Apps In 64 Seconds (csoonline.com)

Posted by BeauHD on Friday April 15, 2016 @01:10PM from the record-time dept.

itwbennett quotes a report from CSO: A new tool from MIT exploits some of the idiosyncrasies in the Ruby on Rails programming framework to quickly uncover new ones, writes Katherine Noyes. In tests on 50 popular web applications written using Ruby on Rails, the system found 23 previously undiagnosed security flaws, and it took no more than 64 seconds to analyze any given program. Ruby on Rails is distinguished from other frameworks because it defines even its most basic operations in libraries. MIT's researchers took advantage of that fact by rewriting those libraries so that the operations defined in them describe their own behavior in a logical language.

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Re:Looks like Perls NYTProf by Anonymous Coward · 2016-04-15 21:23 · Score: 2, Informative

It seems that you can read more about it here:
http://news.mit.edu/2016/patching-web-applications-0415
It mentions that it was done by professor Daniel Jackson and postdoc Joseph Near. Joseph Near seems to have page here:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jnear/
Under software you can find "Derailer" and "Rubicon" (but not "Space) and under theses you can find this PhD:
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/99841
A short overview of the three pieces of software is given on page 15