Threat Model Analysis for varvet/pundit

Threat: Permissive Policy Logic

Threat: Permissive Policy Logic
Description: An attacker exploits overly broad policies to gain unauthorized access. They might identify policies that grant access based on weak conditions or incorrect assumptions and leverage these to access resources or actions they should not be permitted to. For example, a policy might check only for a generic "user" role instead of a more specific role required for a sensitive action.
Impact: Unauthorized access to sensitive data, modification of critical resources, privilege escalation to higher roles, and potential data breaches.
Pundit Component Affected: Policy classes, specifically policy methods (e.g., show?, update?, create?).
Risk Severity: High
Mitigation Strategies:
- Implement granular policies with specific conditions based on user roles, resource attributes, and context.
- Thoroughly review and test all policies, especially those granting broad access.
- Apply the principle of least privilege when defining policies.
- Utilize unit and integration tests specifically for policy logic to ensure intended behavior.
- Conduct regular security audits of policy definitions.

Threat: Direct Controller Action Access (Without Authorization)

Threat: Direct Controller Action Access (Without Authorization)
Description: Developers fail to use Pundit's authorize method in certain controller actions. An attacker can directly access these actions by crafting requests to the corresponding routes, bypassing all Pundit authorization checks.
Impact: Complete bypass of authorization for specific functionalities, potentially leading to unauthorized data access, modification, or deletion.
Pundit Component Affected: Application controllers, specifically the integration points where authorize should be called.
Risk Severity: Critical
Mitigation Strategies:
- Establish a mandatory coding standard requiring the use of authorize in all relevant controller actions.
- Utilize linters or static analysis tools to automatically detect missing authorize calls in controllers.
- Implement integration tests that explicitly verify authorization is enforced for all critical controller actions.
- Conduct thorough code reviews, specifically focusing on authorization enforcement in controllers.

Threat: Misconfiguration of Pundit

Threat: Misconfiguration of Pundit
Description: Incorrect setup of Pundit during application initialization or integration. This could involve failing to include Pundit in controllers, models, or misconfiguring default policy locations. An attacker might exploit a misconfigured Pundit setup if it leads to authorization checks not being performed or policies not being loaded correctly.
Impact: Authorization failures, unexpected behavior, or complete bypass of Pundit if it's not correctly initialized and integrated. Can lead to a completely unprotected application in terms of authorization.
Pundit Component Affected: Pundit's initialization and configuration process, application's integration points with Pundit.
Risk Severity: High to Critical
Mitigation Strategies:
- Carefully follow Pundit's official documentation during setup and integration.
- Verify Pundit is correctly initialized and functioning as expected in all relevant parts of the application after setup.
- Use configuration management tools to ensure consistent Pundit setup across different environments (development, staging, production).
- Include Pundit setup and integration checks in automated deployment and configuration validation processes.