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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

Wow you have a terrible attitude about security. "None of these are an issue, just program in this [very specific way that requires pre-knowledge of these vulnerabilities] and you're safe, anything else is basically negligence."

Your opinions about rails-html-sanitizer are particularly troubling as even if you use the sanitizer as suggested in the docs you're vulnerable and your retort is "well you should encode AND sanitise, not just rely on the sanitiser doing what the documentation says it should do!" Why?

I have no issue with the wording in the official CVEs. But this attempt at whitewashing the, frankly, pretty serious issues is deplorable.

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Some programming styles are not defensive from a security perspective. As a programmer one should acknowledge that using "render" passing a param right from the request, without validating it, is not a good thing, right? That's my point. Some issues here can be solved just by taking the right approach, but won't solve for all of them, of course. XSS mitigation works better with encoding rather than sanitization. If you want me to explain I explain.

But hey, you won't do any good complaining in face of this situation. Time to help people fix it. Peace.

I mean ideally you should 1) strip tags 2) encode 3) use X-XSS headers 4) use CSP headers. That way if any one of these fails, the others will catch it.

That said, there still shouldn't be security holes in the framework.

Stripping tags before encoding is security theatre. Encoding is just replacing 2–4 characters; if it’s not implemented properly, there’s no way tag stripping is.

Well said, I agree.

Calm down a bit! The implication I take from the person you are responding to is not that the vulnerabilities don't matter, but that it's useful to reflect on them and make sure that you are always programming defensively.

They went through most of the issues and shifted blame for the issue from Rails to the developer/user.

"Hopefully you didn't have this weird name in your routes."

"Stripping tags isn't the best way anyway to filter XSS, so if you're encoding, you're good."

"is negligence, you should not be doing that anyway"

"is not defensive programming, so you should not be doing that too"

It isn't "reflecting" it is blame shifting. And there's a huge difference between defensive programming and being psychic, in this case it is more the latter, as even features like the sanitiser we should have known better than to use as the docs tell us to.

Stop making this about ego. The person was helping developers secure their apps and you're trying to make this about who is wrong. Making sure someone feels bad in the open source community won't make anything better.

MINASWAN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MINASWAN

More like "avoid these particular, obviously risky constructs, which any good security scanner will call out as high-priority trouble spots". The two particular constructs he warns against ("render params" and permit! followed by mass assignment) will both get high-priority warnings from Brakeman.

I have a much bigger problem with your post than his--and calling him out for a "terrible attitude" regarding security is a little bit funny seeing as he runs Gauntlet.io, which while not my favorite scanner out there is a legit tool that deserves more respect than you have afforded him. He has his bona fides; where are yours?

And, more concretely, I have no problem with his pointing out that some of--not all, but some--these issues are ones mitigated by decent, security-aware software development practices, like, oh, "don't spit something into a template out of your input parameters". Because tools break. Your libraries break. They will always break. Program defensively in all situations where hostile input is possible and never take for granted any attempts to defuse attacks; always favor braces-and-belt wherever possible and you'll generally do okay. It's entirely unnecessary to be a jerk towards him for saying this.

I'm not sure how who he is or what he does is at all relevant here.

Especially considering that he makes pretty obvious factual errors, e.g:

>[CVE-2015-7578/79] Possible XSS vulnerability in rails-html-sanitizer: You're safe if you use a single page application that properly encode for you. Stripping tags isn't the best way anyway to filter XSS, so if you're encoding, you're good.

If you don't want any HTML you aren't supposed to be using rails-html-sanitizer, it's specifically for scenarios where you can't do that.

True, but there are better alternatives in some situations, e.g., bbcode or markdown processing rather than stripping tags. The point for such scenarios is that whitelist is better than blacklist.

The point for such scenarios is that whitelist is better than blacklist.

from CVE-2015-7580:

Carefully crafted strings can cause user input to bypass the sanitization in the white list sanitizer

So people are using a whitelist, and this bug is in that whitelist. In other words, people are "doing the right thing" and are still vulnerable.

BBcode can go pretty horrifically wrong from a security perspective because you're still generating HTML markup based on unstructured, untrusted user input. There's a long and nasty history of XSS issues in forums that use BBcode where clever use of mismatched markup has made it possible to break the HTML generator enough to inject JavaScript and other nasties.

Absolutely, bbcode and markdown processing are significantly better alternatives.

Also, I'm pretty sure you're specifically supposed to use rails-html-sanitizer with a whitelist. (See: Rails::Html::WhiteListSanitizer)

Such arguments are nonsense. Sure the criticism might be a bit harsh but what on earth do one's credentials matter in such situations? Oh so if I'm not some superstar open source contributor I can't try to point out what could be better in the approaches of another guy who's famous and made huge contributions? We should only look at facts case by case and such a fame-based logic can only be detrimental.

> He has his bona fides; where are yours?

I called him out for his specific replies in this specific thread. I didn't call out his reputation or character.

Maybe you should stick to what they and I actually posted here today, and not try to draw the conversation off track into reputation wars.

> It's entirely unnecessary to be a jerk towards him for saying this.

I don't appreciate being called a "jerk."

I stand by what I said, and what I said was that I felt (and feel) that they have a bad attitude to security. They're trying to shift blame from the rails developers to every rails user, and their excuses are weak.

If you think that is "jerky," that's fine, but I feel like name calling and playing the reputation card for no reason is only going to take a conversation down a bad and unconstructive path.

>I called him out for his specific replies in this specific thread. I didn't call out his reputation or character.

Eh, I'm not sure about that. When I see "Wow you have a terrible attitude about security" I'm inclined to think that's exactly what you're doing. I don't have a horse in this race but you seem to be unnecessarily aggressive/antagonistic and you could have discussed the individual merits of his comment without doing that.

>>I don't appreciate being called a "jerk

Then try not to sound like one? The OP went out of his way to compile and document the important bugs and post them here. You, on the other hand, completely ignored the value of his contribution and instead rudely called him out on a very minor (and frankly, subjective) tonal issue, and went so far as to call it "whitewashing," which implies that he has an agenda.

Did you not notice how OP had absolutely nothing to say about the more serious bugs and instead entirely focused on the less serious ones? (Except for the rails-html-sanitizer bug, which is fairly serious)

He does make multiple valid points though.

I don't understand comments like these.. He's pointing out a legitimate attitude problem which I, and many others, also agree with. There's absolutely no need for the flippant attitude.

If the users of your framework are consistently causing major security problems and the framework is built in a way that it can't be fixed without compromise.. I dunno.. document it? Maybe? Your documentation is basically the API to learning your framework, so if the API is broken to the extent of causing security problems, then it's not god damn production ready!

Remember, if every student is failing your class, the student probably isn't the one to blame.

>>Remember, if every student is failing your class, the student probably isn't the one to blame.

Except not every student is failing the class. Only those not following best practices are.

For example, if you're using params.permit!, you're simply being lazy. This is clearly documented[1]:

"Extreme care should be taken when using permit! as it will allow all current and future model attributes to be mass-assigned."

[1]https://github.com/rails/strong_parameters#permitted-scalar-...

But Rails Culture is to make developers smile!

Fixing security vulnerabilities and writing docs that actually reflect best security practices do not make developers smile.

And accusing to have a terrible attitude does not make a developer smile either, so this is obviously your fault!

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