From: Charles Oliver Nutter <charles.nutter@...>
Date: 2008-07-03T10:36:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Taint mechanism

Yukihiro Matsumoto wrote:
> We are not going to track indirect data flow in the future.  Ruby's
> taint mechanism is a tool to prevent foolish security flaws.  We don't
> need costly data flow analysis for the purpose.  Simple direct data
> flow tracking is enough.

For those considering using tainting/SAFE for security, JRuby's tainting 
is probably not reliable. In general, I believe tainting is a bad 
security mechanism, since it requires a thousand little bits of code all 
over the place to make sure taint propagates correctly and is checked 
when it's important. JRuby users will probably prefer to lean on Java's 
security model, which is more coarse-grained and defined in terms of 
classes of operations rather than individual functions. We don't plan to 
improve taint/SAFE support in JRuby in the future.

- Charlie