14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have put together a new code debugging application that can spot security bugs in Ruby on Rails applications in less than 64 seconds.
Called Space, this new code debugger is the subject of a research paper that will be presented at the International Conference on Software Engineering, in May.
According to the researchers that worked on the project, they say they've rewritten the entire code of the Ruby on Rails (Rails or RoR) framework so it could be defined by simple logical operations.
These operations would then be fed to a static code analyzer that took into account seven ways in which users would interact with the data based on context and their permission levels.
If these interactions were outside of a logical model which Space was expecting, the debugger would deem that operation as the source of a security bug in the underlying code.
MIT researchers said they've tested Space on 50 popular Ruby on Rails applications and found 23 new security bugs. During all tests, researchers say that Space never took more than 64 seconds to analyze each application.
Despite most of the open source community and hype moving to JavaScript and Node.js, the Ruby programming language, and especially Ruby on Rails remain one of the most solid, secure and well-maintained frameworks on the market, making Space a must-have tool for most developers.