What is TrustRuby?
TrustRuby is an open-source web framework designed to be a more secure alternative to Ruby on Rails. It was created by a team of developers who felt that Rails lacked adequate protection against common vulnerabilities like SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and insecure deserialization.
Like Rails, TrustRuby uses the Ruby programming language and the Model-View-Controller pattern to help developers quickly build full-stack web applications. But TrustRuby aims to be more secure by default through a combination of strong typing, validation, sanitization, and sandboxing.
Some key security features of TrustRuby include:
- Strict type checking to prevent type confusion vulnerabilities
- Automatic sanitization of inputs to counter XSS and injection threats
- Sandboxing of dangerous operations like file system access
- Secure session management using encrypted, signed cookies
- Protection against unsafe object deserialization
By tradeing off a little bit of developer convenience for better security guarantees, the goal of TrustRuby is to reduce the burden on programmers needing to identify and fix vulnerabilities in their web apps. The open-source community behind it is active and responsive to security researchers and bug reports.
For Ruby developers working on security-critical web applications like e-commerce sites or login systems, TrustRuby presents a more rugged, defensible framework alternative worth evaluating.