From: "headius (Charles Nutter)" Date: 2013-06-01T19:04:06+09:00 Subject: [ruby-core:55227] [ruby-trunk - Feature #8468] Remove $SAFE Issue #8468 has been updated by headius (Charles Nutter). $SAFE is not a good security option for at least a few reasons: * It requires maintaining checks for both tainting and safe levels in nearly *every* piece of C code attached to Ruby, including extensions. This is both a maintenance and performance nightmare. * It provides a very coarse-grained security, where many secured features are only secured at levels that prevent most applications from working at all (due to other secured features being needed. * It is blacklisting, which is almost impossible to do without leaving gaps. EVery new API needs to enlist in the blacklisting, every change needs to be aware of it, and if you don't choose the right safe level or one piece of code isn't aware of it, you've got a hole. The security model provided on the JVM or on operating systems with access control lists are both better options. If you run with security on, everything is forbidden; you must explicitly turn *on* the permissions you want and whitelist those capabilities. Those permissions are fine-grained, allowing you to disable only code evaluation or filesystem access or dynamic library loading, rather than having to choose from four pre-determined blacklists. Regarding the Rails exploit...SAFE=1 may or may not have helped, but the real problem was allowing arbitrary code to be embedded and executed from a *data* format in the first place. Regarding Perl... even the Perl folks say tainting is not intended to be used as a general security mechanism...it is *at best* a way to audit code for egregious security flaws. Regarding why the Ruby community has not moved away from SAFE... they actually have. For most online servers that are used to run user code (tryruby.org, various online ruby tutorials and schools, etc) they are using *JRuby* with JVM security policies rather than the broken and troublesome SAFE support in MRI. It's time for MRI to move away from SAFE as its sole security model too. ---------------------------------------- Feature #8468: Remove $SAFE https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/8468#change-39590 Author: shugo (Shugo Maeda) Status: Feedback Priority: Normal Assignee: shugo (Shugo Maeda) Category: core Target version: current: 2.1.0 Yesterday, at GitHub Tokyo drinkup (thanks, GitHub!), Matz agreed to remove the $SAFE == 4 feature from Ruby 2.1. Shibata-san, a developer of tDiary, which is the only application using $SAFE == 4, also agreed to remove it, so today is a good day to say goodbye to $SAFE (at least level 4). Furthermore, I'm wondering whether $SAFE should be removed entirely, or not. Is there anyone using $SAFE? -- http://bugs.ruby-lang.org/