HolePicker is a Ruby gem for quickly checking all your Gemfile.lock files for gem versions with known vulnerabilities.
The beginning of 2013 was a really bad time for the Ruby community. In the first few weeks of the year at least 7 serious security issues were found, and Rails had to be updated 4 times so far because of this. It's probably not the end. It's hard to keep track of all the issues and remember which gem versions are OK and which aren't, especially if you have several older and newer Ruby or Rails projects to maintain. So I wrote this tool in order to help with identifying which gems in your projects' gemfiles need to be updated.
The idea is that there is a JSON file* stored in this repository that lists all the recent security-related updates to popular gems: date of the release, URL of the announcement, and a list of affected gems and updated versions. HolePicker provides a command line tool that downloads the latest data file from GitHub every time, scans your Gemfile.lock files and checks if they contain vulnerable gem versions.
The reason I've done it this way is to make it easier to run the checks against the very latest version of the vulnerability list. It's kind of important to be sure that you haven't missed any last minute updates, and it would be annoying to have to check for new gem versions every time you want to run the tool (and you might not even remember to do that).
If for some reason you don't want to download the JSON file every time, you can use the -o option. Also, the JSON file specifies the minimum compatible gem version that it can work with, so if new kind of information is added to the file that requires the gem to be updated in order to parse it, the gem will let you know.
Of course the whole system still relies on me manually adding entries to the JSON file and pushing it to GitHub. I'll try to do that quickly, my trusty @rails_bot notifies me pretty quickly when something really bad is happening. If for some reason I don't update the list in time, by all means please send me a pull request.
(*) YAML obviously wouldn't be appropriate, if you know what I mean.
To install the tool, just run:
gem install holepicker
There are two main modes of operation:
This can be used to scan project directories on your development machine:
holepicker ~/Projects
You can also scan all apps deployed to a production or demo server; in this case, it's recommended to use the -c (--current) option in order to skip the old releases in releases directories and only scan the current directories (I'm assuming you use Capistrano for deployment, because who doesn't?).
holepicker -c /var/www
You might have a lot of random apps deployed in the /var/www directory, but only some of them currently enabled in the Nginx config files. In this case, you might want to only check the apps that are actually running. To do that, use the -f (--follow-roots) option and point HolePicker to your HTTP server's config directory. It will find all the root or DocumentRoot directives and follow the paths to find the gemfiles of enabled apps.
holepicker -f /etc/nginx/sites-enabled
This is more or less what you will get if you run HolePicker in a directory with some old Rails projects:
-a, --all
By default, HolePicker will skip directories like .git, tmp, cached-copy etc. when searching for gemfiles. This option turns this feature off.
-c, --current
Look only for gemfiles that are located directly in a current directory.
-f, --follow-roots
Look for root/DocumentRoot directives in config files at given locations instead of gemfiles directly.
-i, --ignore gem1,gem2,gem3
Ignore the gems passed in the parameter.
-o, --offline
Use an offline copy of the data file - useful if you really need to run the tool, but the network or GitHub is down.
The bundler-audit project that was also created this week has a similar purpose, but it only uses an offline issue list and it only scans the current project.
The gemcanary project might be something similar, but it hasn't been released yet (as of 16.02).
It might make sense to agree on a shared list of vulnerabilities in the future that these and other projects could share - no point having the same information in a few different places maintained by a few people in parallel.
Created by Jakub Suder, licensed under MIT License.
Any feedback and help is welcome, if you have an idea how to improve this tool, let me know or send me an issue or a pull request.
And BTW, big thanks to all the smart people that find and fix all these issues - I hope you won't find much more, but please keep looking.