Dave Elkins

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Jim Neath has posted a good list of plugins for building Social Apps in Rails.  The list of plugins are very useful in any Rails app and I have used many of them.

http://jimneath.org/2008/04/25/building-a-social-network-site-in-rails/

http://www.rorsecurity.info/2007/10/28/restful_authentication-login-security/

http://www.quarkruby.com/2007/9/20/ruby-on-rails-security-guide

This is a plugin called FragmentFu that was made by the Revolution on Rails guys.

http://revolutiononrails.blogspot.com/2007/08/fragmentfu-fun-with-fragments.html

This is from the Revolution on Rails blog and talks about ESI.

http://revolutiononrails.blogspot.com/2007/08/advanced-rails-caching-on-edge.html

Steve Odom has released Elastic Rails which is a plugin that allows you to easily deploy your Rails app to EC2 using Capistrano.

There are two plugins that can help prevent CSRF attacks. I have not had a chance to take these for a test drive but I will soon and I blog about how they work. CSRF stands for Cross-site request forgery Attack (link) and is an upcoming type of attack used against web sites.

Security Extensions

The first plugin is called Security extensions and can be downloaded at http://svn.aviditybytes.com/rails/plugins/security_extensions/.

CSRF Killer

The second plugin is called CSRF Killer and it can be downloaded at http://activereload.net/2007/3/6/your-requests-are-safe-with-us

This one is made by Rick Olsen who has made a ton of popular plugins for rails. This page has a lot of information about CSRF attacks [link].

Conclusions

Neither of these will be silver bullets but they can help and do not add a lot of overhead to your development and it makes your job easier when it comes to securing your web apps.