MIT’s new bug finder uncovers flaws in Web apps in 64 seconds

Finding bugs in Web applications is an ongoing challenge, but a new tool from MIT exploits some of the idiosyncrasies in the Ruby on Rails programming framework to quickly uncover new ones.

In tests on 50 popular Web applications written using Ruby on Rails, the system found 23 previously undiagnosed security flaws, and it took no more than 64 seconds to analyze any given program.

Ruby on Rails is distinguished from other frameworks because it defines even its most basic operations in libraries. MIT’s researchers took advantage of that fact by rewriting those libraries so that the operations defined in them describe their own behavior in a logical language.

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