Rails Authorization and Security question

rubyonrails-talk
1

Working through the Users and Authentication of Learning Rails book (great book, code needs to be proof-read in a few cases, though), I came across this:

There’s still one leftover that may be worth addressing, depending on your security needs. The authorization? method has secured the data, and the view no longer shows the user options they can’t really use, but if a user knows the URL for the edit form, it will still open. It’s a GET request, after all. This is a good reason to make sure that these forms don’t display any information that isn’t publicly available through other means. If this is an issue, it may be worth the effort of adding authorization checks to every controller method that could spring a leak.

Any good reason why I do that instead of adding the checks to the view pages, like?

**<% if current_user.admin? %>**

**<display page>**



**<% else %>**

**<don't display page>**

**<% end%>**



 - Rilindo
2

It would probably be easier to prevent users from viewing those pages using a filter. If you are using AuthenticatedSystem, you might be able to tap into the login_required function. An example filter would be like

<… in your controller class …> before_filter :login_required, :except => [:show]

Hope that helps.

3

Hey, that is easier. I’ll have to save this.

Thanks!

4

I am using Authlogic for authentification and rails_authorization_plugin for authorization

when needed, at the beginning of a controller I write

  before_filter :require_user # can be also require_no_user to exclude multi-sessions from same user   before_filter :check_authorization, :except => :index # to control access

and at the end of the controller , check for the all page access... can be also per action      # If the user is not authorized, just throw the exception.       def check_authorization         permit "superadmin or administrator" do           return         end         render_403       end