From: Florian Gross <flgr@...>
Date: 2004-12-29T01:41:47+09:00
Subject: Re: Restricting file access in Ruby

John Allen wrote:

> Hey, I don't know if this is a subject that's been beat to death or not as
> I'm new to the group, but I wanted to ask whether anyone's extended Ruby to
> allow scripts to (dis)allow access to files based on some sort of user
> defined mechanism.
> 
> [...]
> 
> I've been reading through the code in the ruby-1.8.2 source tree, and I'm
> learning how it's all tied together.  I guess my question is where to put
> my checks.  Also, I feel funny even suggesting this because it seems to go
> against everything I've read about Ruby making things less complicated and
> bloated.

I'd suggest using $SAFE and having a custom interface for doing IO that 
goes through your special privilege checks. But you might be right in 
that patching Ruby for this would make security breaches less likely.