Enabling ASM for Ruby

You can monitor application security for Ruby apps running in Docker, Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, and AWS Fargate.

In general, setting up Application Security Management (ASM) involves:

  1. Identifying services that are vulnerable or are under attack, which would most benefit from ASM. Find them on the Security tab of your Service Catalog.
  2. Updating to the latest Datadog library (the most recent APM tracing library).
  3. Enabling the library to collect the application security data from the services and send it to Datadog.
  4. Triggering security signals in your application and seeing how Datadog displays the resulting information.

Prerequisites

1-Click Enablement
If your service is running with an Agent with Remote Configuration enabled and a tracing library version that supports it, hover over the Not Enabled indicator in the ASM Status column and click Enable ASM. There's no need to re-launch the service with the DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true or --enable-appsec flags.

Enabling threat detection

Get started

  1. Update your Gemfile to include the Datadog library:

    gem 'ddtrace', '~> 1.1'

    To check that your service’s language and framework versions are supported for ASM capabilities, see Compatibility.

    For more information about upgrading from a dd-trace 0.x version, see the Ruby tracer upgrade guide.

  2. Enable ASM by enabling the APM tracer. The following options describe a quick setup that covers the most common cases. Read the Ruby tracer documentation for more details.

    You can enable ASM either in your code:

      Enable the APM tracer by adding an initializer in your application code:

      # config/initializers/datadog.rb

require 'datadog/appsec'

Datadog.configure do |c|
  # enable the APM tracer
  c.tracing.instrument :rails

  # enable ASM
  c.appsec.enabled = true
  c.appsec.instrument :rails
end

      Or enable the APM tracer through auto-instrumentation by updating your Gemfile to auto-instrument:

      gem 'ddtrace', '~> 1.1', require: 'ddtrace/auto_instrument'

      And also enable appsec:

      # config/initializers/datadog.rb

require 'datadog/appsec'

Datadog.configure do |c|
  # the APM tracer is enabled by auto-instrumentation

  # enable ASM
  c.appsec.enabled = true
  c.appsec.instrument :rails
end

      Enable the APM tracer by adding the following to your application’s startup:

      require 'sinatra'
require 'ddtrace'
require 'datadog/appsec'

Datadog.configure do |c|
  # enable the APM tracer
  c.tracing.instrument :sinatra

  # enable ASM for Sinatra
  c.appsec.enabled = true
  c.appsec.instrument :sinatra
end

      Or enable the APM tracer through auto-instrumentation:

      require 'sinatra'
require 'ddtrace/auto_instrument'

Datadog.configure do |c|
  # the APM tracer is enabled by auto-instrumentation

  # enable ASM for Sinatra
  c.appsec.enabled = true
  c.appsec.instrument :sinatra
end

      Enable the APM tracer by adding the following to your config.ru file:

      require 'ddtrace'
require 'datadog/appsec'

Datadog.configure do |c|
  # enable the APM tracer
  c.tracing.instrument :rack

  # enable ASM for Rack
  c.appsec.enabled = true
  c.appsec.instrument :rack
end

use Datadog::Tracing::Contrib::Rack::TraceMiddleware
use Datadog::AppSec::Contrib::Rack::RequestMiddleware

      Or one of the following methods, depending on where your application runs:

        Update your configuration container for APM by adding the following argument in your docker run command:

        docker run [...] -e DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true [...]

        Add the following environment variable value to your container Dockerfile:

        ENV DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true

        Update your configuration yaml file container for APM and add the AppSec env variable:

        spec:
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
        - name: <CONTAINER_NAME>
          image: <CONTAINER_IMAGE>/<TAG>
          env:
            - name: DD_APPSEC_ENABLED
              value: "true"

        Update your ECS task definition JSON file, by adding this in the environment section:

        "environment": [
  ...,
  {
    "name": "DD_APPSEC_ENABLED",
    "value": "true"
  }
]

        Initialize ASM in your code or set DD_APPSEC_ENABLED environment variable to true in your service invocation:

        env DD_APPSEC_ENABLED=true rails server

        The library collects security data from your application and sends it to the Agent, which sends it to Datadog, where out-of-the-box detection rules flag attacker techniques and potential misconfigurations so you can take steps to remediate.

      • To see Application Security Management threat detection in action, send known attack patterns to your application. For example, trigger the Security Scanner Detected rule by running a file that contains the following curl script:

        for ((i=1;i<=250;i++)); 
        do
        # Target existing service’s routes
        curl https://your-application-url/existing-route -A dd-test-scanner-log;
        # Target non existing service’s routes
        curl https://your-application-url/non-existing-route -A dd-test-scanner-log;
        done

        Note: The dd-test-scanner-log value is supported in the most recent releases.

        A few minutes after you enable your application and exercise it, threat information appears in the Application Trace and Signals Explorer in Datadog.

      Further Reading

      Additional helpful documentation, links, and articles:

      Adding user information to tracesDOCUMENTATION more more Ruby Datadog library source codeGITHUB more more OOTB Application Security Management RulesDOCUMENTATION more more Troubleshooting Application Security ManagementDOCUMENTATION more more