Hot Cell: Securing Active Storage in the age of AI
Active Storage was not designed to handle the flood of CVEs generated by AI-assisted security researchers. As a result, Rails apps are at risk from vulnerabilities in the underlying system libraries that process attachments. However, Active Storage is flexible enough to extend the architecture and secure it. Introducing Hot Cell, a suite of gems that moves attachment processing out of your Rails application and into a secure sidecar container. This talk explains how to configure and deploy Hot Cell to secure your application. You'll learn how Active Storage attachment processing works, and why image library vulnerabilities are so dangerous. You'll also learn how Hot Cell works, and how to observe and tune it at scale like we have at 37signals.