Categories
rails ruby Security

Rails IP Spoofing Vulnerabilities and Protection

I’ve recently bumped into an interesting post about a stackoverflow vulnerability discovered by Anthony Ferrara. I didn’t think too much about it. I’ve come across similar issues before, where the application relies on a piece of information that might be easy to forge. Telephony systems are vulnerable to Caller ID spoofing, which becomes increasingly easier with Voice-Over-IP providers. Web based applications can also be fooled if they rely on header information, such as the X-Forwarded-For, typically used by Proxy servers.

I was experimenting with switching rails from Phusion Passenger to Unicorn, when I suddenly came across a strange error message:

ActionDispatch::RemoteIp::IpSpoofAttackError (IP spoofing attack?!HTTP_CLIENT_IP="192.168.0.131"HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR="192.168.0.131"): app/controllers/application_controller.rb:138:in `append_info_to_payload'

That looked quite impressive. Rails is trying to identify spoofing attacks and raise an exception when it happens? Nice.

However, after digging a little deeper, trying to figure out what’s actually happening, it seems that Rails might actually be vulnerable to spoofing attacks under certain setups. I will try to describe those scenarios and suggest a few workarounds to avoid any pitfalls.

What I observed applies to Rails latest stable (3.2.9 at the time of writing), previous versions and potentially future versions as well (including 4.0).

TL;DR

Your rails application might be vulnerable to IP spoofing. To test it, try to add a fake X-Forwarded-For header and check which IP address appears in your log files.

e.g.

curl -H "X-Forwarded-For: 5.5.5.5" http://your.website.com

You can try to implement one of the workarounds mentioned below.

Categories
Security Technology

I’m not pinterested in spam

Just a quick rant this time.

I recently signed-up for pinterest. I wasn’t actually interested in signing-up, but wanted to see what their sign-up process looks like. If you’ve read one of my previous posts, you’d know I nearly always use unique, unpredictable email addresses for new services I sign-up to. Pinterest registration is quite nice, and only asks for a few details and an email address (that is, if you prefer a username and password instead of using Facebook or Twitter to login). Once you enter the details, pinterest sends you a Please verify your email message to your inbox. So far, so good.

However, what happens if you don’t verify your email? As was the case here. I wasn’t actually interested in creating an account. I assumed that I won’t hear from pinterest again. Wrong. I just received an email from pinterest, announcing their new secret boards. So much for confirming my account. According to Spamhaus, this is considered unconfirmed opt-in which is categorized as spam.

To add insult to injury, if I try to opt-out from the email I just received, Pinterest asks me to login to my (unconfirmed) account. These are all small annoyances, I know. But is it really that difficult to do things right? An unconfirmed account should not receive any messages. Opt-out links should just be one click and that’s it.