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.
Each check performed by Brakeman is independent, so testing can be limited to a subset of all the checks Brakeman comes with.
While Brakeman may not be exceptionally speedy, it is much faster than “black box” website scanners. Even large applications should not take more than a few minutes to scan.
Only the developers of an application can understand if certain values are dangerous or not. By default, Brakeman is extremely suspicious. This can lead to many “false positives.”