As is sadly often the case, well-meaning newcomers to programming take on the newest and/or most popular programming language/framework available. And as you might suspect, they usually get it wrong and make every design and security mistake possible along the way!

This is a trend that we’ve seen with pretty much every popular programming language out there – like for example PHP, which sadly still holds the record for most insecure websites written in the language.

One very popular web framework these days is Ruby on Rails, created by the very talented 29 year old Danish guy David Heinemeier Hansson. It uses a Model-View-Controller construction and emphasizes good design by such principles as DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). By all means it’s a very good web framework! But as with PHP, a lot of newcomers get it wrong. Either by not following the Ruby on Rails conventions or by ignoring security!

Now, we’re not here to teach you about design. If you want to learn more about proper software design, a good place to start is simply your local library. Look for books on topics like Design Patterns, Software Engineering, Extreme Programming, Test Driven Development and Agile Software Development.

However what we do want to teach you about, is proper security in Ruby on Rails! Luckily, we don’t have to take out extreme amounts of time from the work we need to do, to get you trained in RoR security – instead we can simply refer to the work already done by the OWASP organization. OWASP is an organization working to improve web application security in the entire world, by means of a whole bunch of different projects for developers, security professionals and end users. One of these projects is the Ruby on Rails Security Guide V2 project which includes a PDF file detailing the different security concerns and solutions concerning Ruby on Rails development.

If you are going to develop Ruby on Rails applications (or if you’re simply curious) please download the Ruby on Rails Security Guide from OWASP and read it before doing any production deployment of applications.

Note: If you’re too busy to go to the project page on OWASP and find the download link, then here’s a direct download link instead: Download the Security Guide

Of all the trade fairs in the world, none quite rivals CeBIT when it comes to sheer size. With over 20 years of experience, it is still the world’s largest trade fair and showcases some of the up-and-coming home and office solutions in IT and Telecommunications.

Coming up to the CeBIT entrance

Sadly however, CeBIT has been experiencing decreased visitor numbers for the last few years and this year was obviously no exception – especially not given the economic circumstances of these times. None the less, Aconiac decided to attend the conference as a visitor and see what other companies have come up with these days.

For all you readers that happen to not know, CeBIT consists of a number of halls, where every hall has a few different fields of interest. There are halls with Server Technologies, Business Storage, Virtualization etc, and there are other halls with e.g. Telematics & Navigation, Automotive Solutions, Transport & Logistics, Satelite Navigation etc. etc. All in all there are a total of 26 different halls, sporting over 100 different subjects – so there should be something for almost any interest! On top of this there is an abundance of kiosks, bistros and the like, so you have to actively try to avoid eating in order to go hungry all day! A whole day is by the way also basically how long it takes to get around to every hall!

The new CeBIT Security World exhibit.

One hall was especially interesting for us, since it was CeBIT’s new Security World hall. According to the plan, this should include Anti-Malware Solutions, Security Tools & Services, Biometrics, Card Technologies, Network Security, Video Surveillance and more. But we’ll get back to that specific hall later. Let’s first take a look at what was interesting at CeBIT this year!

Now obviously, the economic crisis has effectively removed many of the fun things from the fair, but curtain things have however remained. And there were a few items we found especially cool this year.

Two of these items came from Asus, whom have gained extended world-wide focus after the release of the first Asus Eee computers and subsequent popularity increases of such products. They’ve now come up with a couple of completely new computers. Both of which change the way we do personal computing, if they ever gain extensive popularity.

Asus' cool book laptop

The first, and probably most interesting, is this Asus book-like laptop. What makes this interesting is the fact that the laptop actually doesn’t have a keyboard of any kind – it instead has two screens! What this does is that software on the laptop can activate the bottom screen, which is actually a touchscreen, and put up a virtual keyboard on that screen. This way, you will be able to use the laptop just like any other laptop (We however weren’t allowed to touch it, so I’m not sure if the virtual keyboard is even a feasible tool to use for anything serious).

Asus' book laptop - flipped

But not only can you use it as a normal laptop, it also makes a new and unique operation possible – It can function as a book!
If you turn the laptop around, an accelerometer in the laptop detects this and immediately turns the virtual keyboard into an actual screen, so that you can use it to open .pdf files (and the like) and simply start reading! Products like this might very well be the early products that end up replacing printed media completely, even though that’s probably still quite some time in the future.

But again: We weren’t allowed to touch it, so it’s very hard to know how easy it actually was to use. Whether or not it is a product one would actually use is quite difficult to answer, so please don’t just go out and buy it just because we said it was cool! It might be a very good product and it might also not at all be!

Another cool product from Asus was this keyboard computer. So what do I mean by keyboard computer? Well, it’s actually quite literal! A computer stuffed completely into a small keyboard, so that you only have to bring the keyboard, find a big screen and plug yourself in to that screen, and you’re ready to go!

Keyboard as an entire computer

Whether or not this product is just a weird idea or it’s the future of laptops – well who knows? Personally I don’t believe this will be a hit, simply because the screen is missing. If you don’t have a big screen anywhere near you, you have to use the small screen in the right bottom corner – Not really a fantastic solution, because how often do you actually have a spare screen with you everywhere? The keyboard computer will probably only function as a replacement for large home computer systems, where computing power is not of much concern to the family members.

So all in all this exact product is probably not going to make much of a change! And sadly there weren’t much else innovative at CeBIT this year. It seems the financial crisis has taken away much of the interesting stuff and kept all the, at times, irritating sales personnel that’s scattered all over the place to try and sell you one electronic product after another!

So bummed out due to the lack of interesting products, we tried to figure out what to do next. After a bit of food and a small beer, we decided to take a look at the new and “fantastic” Security World hall.

Kaspersky Labs

Sadly however, our hopes of interesting exhibitors and good products was kinda beat down. There wasn’t really anything fantastic or innovating in the entire hall and most exhibitors were also quite unknown to us. Not that being unknown is necessarily a bad thing, but if you’re a anti-virus company and you’re completely unknown, you’ve also never been critically evaluated in international tests and therefore never had your products tested up against its competitors. This is by all means a bad thing! However, in regards to anti-virus, the master was however still there – Kaspersky!

Even kids can do surveillance! ..

One thing that was kinda interesting though, was the surveillance part of the hall. Here you could get any form of spy equipment, cameras, microphones etc. Even kids could apparently use this stuff, as was apparent from the little guy playing around with the 10-20 cameras mounted all over this exhibit! I really like that picture actually! It quite effectively shows where we’re going in our society if people don’t soon get up off of there asses and start fighting the extreme surveillance trend that has been going on since 2001.

So all in all the Security World exhibit was kinda disappointing. Not only were there not really any innovative products, many of the things you would expect, wasn’t there either. Why wasn’t e.g. HP there with WebInspect and DevInspect? Or RSA? Or Tennable Security? Or, in more of a open source direction, OpenBSD? Many of the relevant groups and companies where not represented. (To be fair, BSD was in another hall, but in another capacity)

We care!

After the day went to an end, we drifted over to Munchenhalle, which is basically a classical German Tyrolean restaurant thing where people go after CeBIT to eat and .. well.. get stinking drunk! So we did exactly that and got to do a bunch of stuff like dance the bogey bogey, buy a Tyrolean hat for 20 Euros, spoke Danish with a Vietnamese guy and even sang happy birthday to a Chinese guy.. So no matter how good CeBIT is during the day, it usually always ends well

But in all seriousness again! Sadly I’m afraid the economic crisis scared some of the biggest companies away, which inevitably lowered the relevance of many of the halls. Now, to be fair, CeBIT usually has an over representation of companies selling their normal products, compared to companies showing off their new innovative products. However before it’s been somewhat of another ratio! Basically, we decided a good characterization is this: CeBIT usually consists of a turd covered in sprinkles.. in order to get the sprinkles you need to get a bit of the turd! However now CeBIT is more like a turd consisting of 10% embedded sprinkles.. now you actually have to eat the entire turd to get the damn sprinkles.. and even then, there are way to few sprinkles

See you next year at CeBIT

So with that disgusting analogy, I leave you with whatever you were doing and will simply say:

Cheers, hopefully we’ll see you next year at CeBIT!

NOTE: This is a technical post regarding Apache on Linux with support for Ruby on Rails. Basic understanding of these concepts is necessary!

Normally you want to make sure your server doesn’t give out any information about service versions, however mod_rails doesn’t provide any easy way of doing this within the module itself. There is however a fairly easy solution. Simply use mod_headers to remove the headers in Apache.

So how is it done? Very simple, just enable the module mod_headers and add the snippet below to httpd.conf or another included configuration file in Apache. Both actions have to be done as root of course.

Enable the mod_headers module (This example is Linux Debian – it might be different for your system)

# cd /etc/apache2/mods-available/
# a2enmod headers

Add these lines to httpd.conf

Header always unset "X-Powered-By"
Header always unset "X-Runtime"

Restart the Apache server (Again – this is Debian! It might be different for you)

# apache2ctl restart

And there you go. Try making e.g. a Nikto scan on the server and see if the headers aren’t there any more.

NOTE: This news item was originally posted on December 30, 2008

2008 will soon be over and a new and exciting year lies in front of us. 2008 was an interesting year for computer security. We saw, once again, escalating threats towards companies from almost all fronts. Especially the leaks of unencrypted data in England, the automated SQL injection mass-attacks and the attacks on social network services were some of the big public problems in 2008.
But then how will 2009 be? Now, it’s obviously very hard to predict the future in such a dynamic world, however we have made an effort to come up with our ideas for what might be, the 10 biggest security threats in 2009: