Sweet Jesus. Please publish a security reporting page at the earliest possible convenience, because this will have private info on it within a day from now, and that is a very bad idea right now.
... is a question which would be better to answer privately, to a security contact. Use your imagination as to what the email would likely say.
This may just be a difference of philosophy, but I don't think "It isn't really a release, so nobody would be stupid enough to actually run this on a publicly accessible server." After all, consumers of The New Hotness have a lot less incentive to think through the security implications of running it than the developers did. [Edit: And the developers apparently have a publicly accessible instance running. That decision is curious.]
This will be running in production today. If very bad things happen, the TechCrunch article about it will have Diaspora in the headline.
That is enough of an incentive to have a security page.
They just did a media launch and they're in for their earliest users getting burned in a very painful, public manner. If this isn't an emergency, what does an emergency look like?
"hundreds of other bits of (unsafe, untested) social networking code floating around the interwebs" is not a benchmark that this project should aspire to.
Here, let me tell you what isn't a problem: you cannot type "system('rm -rf /')" into their username field on the signup form and wipe any machine with Diaspora installed because some idiot passed untrusted user input straight to exec. But if that were a problem, do you understand why mentioning publicly "Hey, the username field is passed straight to exec... that's sort of bad." is a bad idea? Because that lets any idiot immediately create wipe_arbitrary_diaspora_install.rb
There are several vulnerabilities in Diaspora right now. They allow very bad things. There are multiple public Diaspora installations. They are all vulnerable to very bad things.
I think releasing this was very, very premature.
It's been added to the README at http://github.com/diaspora/diaspora
And they will be the same person that complains really loudly when it goes wrong :)
>Feel free to try to get it running on your machines and use it, but we give no guarantees. We know there are security holes and bugs, and your data is not yet fully exportable. If you do find something, be sure to log it in our bugtracker, and we would love screenshots and browser info.
That seems to cover it, doesn't it?
Any disclosed vulnerability is an exploit roadmap for these public instances. Speaking generally, exploits of public web apps can sometimes be pretty severe. Yes, the software is immature, but is now immature and an attack vector.
There's actually more of a case for disclosing security bugs in established products if the vendor doesn't respond quickly enough. If people are relying on a product for critical uses, having information that lets them minimize their risk could be helpful. I don't see the benefit in this case.