Update
Please note that since Tastypie v0.9.12 the authorization framework was rewritten. Lots of information on this post no longer applies. I’m hoping to write a follow-up post at some stage.
Original Post
I’ve been using tastypie, the very awesome django REST API framework for a little while now (btw, that’s not the official title, but it might as well be). I’m not going to write yet another comparison between tastypie and django-piston. My reasons for choosing tastypie were that its code looked nicer, and it seemed a much more active project.
One of the things that I immediately liked about tastypie, being a security-geek and all, was the security framework built into it. Primarily the authentication and authorization classes. They make it very easy to extend, and almost a no-brainer to apply to any resource. This means that providing resource-level authorization is also very easy and clean.
However, whilst working with tastypie and applying some authorization rules to my resources, I noticed a couple of pitfalls. Those are quite easy to miss if you’re not very familiar with the tastypie codebase. I wouldn’t say it’s a vulnerability or a bug as such, perhaps more of a (sub-optimal) design choice from a security-perspective. That said, if you use tastypie incorrectly, or unaware of those pitfalls, you might create a security vulnerability on your otherwise delicious API.