Audience
Development teams interested in a security scanner for Ruby on Rails applications
About Brakeman
Brakeman is a security scanner for Ruby on Rails applications. Unlike many web security scanners, Brakeman looks at the source code of your application. This means you do not need to set up your whole application stack to use it. Once Brakeman scans the application code, it produces a report of all security issues it has found. Brakeman requires zero setup or configuration once it is installed. Just run it. Because all Brakeman needs is source code, Brakeman can be run at any stage of development: you can generate a new application with rails new and immediately check it with Brakeman. Since Brakeman does not rely on spidering sites to determine all their pages, it can provide more complete coverage of an application. This includes pages which may not be ‘live’ yet. In theory, Brakeman can find security vulnerabilities before they become exploitable. Brakeman is specifically built for Ruby on Rails applications, so it can easily check configuration settings for best practices.