URL faking with nested resources

rubyonrails-talk
1

I've created a three tiered nested resource tree as defined below. My problem is that it's easy for a user to fake the URL and pull image records from another users account since there is no check to see if the image actually belongs to the user. Does anyone have a recommendation on how I can secure this in a DRY manner? Is there some sort of plugin or base functionality that I can't seem to find by googling?

map.resources :people do |person|      person.resources :events do |event|        event.resources :images      end end

For example, if a user types in the following url they will get the image whether or not the image is part of an event which belongs to the specified user:

http://localhost/people/123/events/456/images/789

Thanks,

Mike

2

It seems that if you authenticate your user (probably your person), then you can safely assume ownership of events and images. So using your example, the ImagesController will be in charge of serving this page. This might translate to:

{:controller => 'images', :id => 789, :event_id=> 456, :person_id => 123}

Thus, you might write code in your controller such as:

if Session.user_authenticated(params[:person_id])    image = Person.find(params[:person_id]).events.find(params[:event_id]).images.find(params[:id]) else    flash[:error] = 'go steal images someplace else' end

The "user_authenticated" method might be something you would add to RESTful Authentication to compare the params[:person_id] to the id of the current user.

3

you might want to read the following about nesting resources more than 2 levels deep: Buckblog: Nesting resources

having said that, the normal way to do this is by scoping to the specified resource:

class EventsController < ApplicationController

before_filter :get_person

def get_person @person = People.find_by_id(params[:person_id]) end

def index @events = @person.events end

def edit @event = @person.events.find_by_id(params[:id]) ... end

Mike