Ruby SDK for user monitoring

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Sqreen protects your application users against major threats, such as account takeover, password bruteforce, suspicious activities coming from TOR or an unusual VPN.

Sqreen supports Devise out of the box for automatic user context. If you are using Devise, you do not need to change anything, as long as you have selected the automatic mode in your application settings.

Advanced User Context allows you to set up user monitoring in your application with flexibility and powerful additional features. You need to integrate the Sqreen SDK in your application.

User monitoring SDK

The Sqreen SDK integration relies on three methods: signup_track, auth_track and identify.

Here is a full implementation example:

require 'sqreen'

class SessionsController < ApplicationController
  def create
    user = login(params[:email], params[:password])
    Sqreen.auth_track(!user.nil?, email: params[:email])
    # ....
  end
end

class UsersController < ApplicationController
  def create
    user_params = params.require(:user)
    user = User.create!(user_params)
    Sqreen.signup_track(email: user_params[:email])
    # ....
  end
end

class ApplicationController
  before_action :tag_request

  private

  def tag_request
    if current_user
      Sqreen.identify(email: current_user.email)
    end
  end
end

Login tracking

Sqreen.auth_track is the SDK method to call on user login activity.

require 'sqreen'
Sqreen.auth_track(is_login_successful, email: user.email)

The auth_track function accepts two positional arguments:

def auth_track(success, user_identifiers)

1. The first argument is a boolean indicating if the login attempt was successful or not (True or False).

2. The second argument is a Hash with your user identification information. Sqreen's user interface uses it to help you identify which users are at risk, or which are attacking your application. The hash keys and values must be strings.

Sqreen integration at signup and login

You should not call Sqreen.auth_track each time you check a user session in your application.

Signup tracking

Sqreen.signup_track is the SDK method to call when creating a new user account at signup.

require 'sqreen'
Sqreen.signup_track(email: user.email)

The signup_track function accepts a single argument:

def signup_track(user_identifiers)

user_identifiers is a Hash representing your identification information. Sqreen's user interface uses it to help you identify which users are at risk, or which are attacking your application. The hash keys and values must be strings.

Session tracking

Sqreen.identify is the SDK method to map a user to the current HTTP request.

{!sdk/block-user-requires-identify-warning.md!}

When the request is not identified using this method, Sqreen falls back to login tracking information to map a user. It's a best effort approach based on the recent activity of users on the request's IPs.

The identify function accepts two arguments:

def identify(user_identifiers, traits)

1. The first argument is a Hash representing your user identification information. Sqreen's user interface uses it to help you identify which users are at risk, or which are attacking your application.

2. The second argument is an optional Hash of traits about the user. The hash keys and values must be strings.

User traits

At the moment, we do not display or process the traits. In a future release, we'll display them to help attack investigation and allow you to build custom workflows. Interested in this feature? Contact us.

Block users (security automation)

When using the Security Automation built-in block user security response, you must implement identify and auth_track methods to block users at login or during their session. Otherwise, Sqreen will not be able to map a user context to requests performed on your application.

Learn more about login and session tracking.

User identification

If your program identifies users with a single value (email, nickname...), you can proceed that way:

Sqreen.auth_track(true, email: user.email)

User monitoring and PII

To learn more about sending sensitive data to us without leaking any Personally Identifying Information (PII), visit this blogpost to learn some best practices around user tracking.

If your program identifies users with a composite primary key (more than one value), send all the values to identify them accurately in Sqreen's user interface.

For example, if you are operating a whitelabel platform and it identifies your users by their email and the shop ID, you can send these identifiers like this:

Sqreen.auth_track(true, email: user.email, platform_id: platform.id)

This also applies to the signup_track and identify functions.

The Sqreen SDK only accepts user identifiers

Do not send any other information (like the auth failure reason). Sqreen will consider them as part of the user identifier, and will not be able to merge successful and failed authentications.

Primary key

Sqreen tries to determine a primary key amongst the keys you provided. Sqreen uses the following keywords to determine the user primary identification key: email, mail, e-mail, username, login.

If Sqreen cannot find any of those keys, it uses the first key in alphabetic order.

If Sqreen finds more than one key, it uses the first in the sequence mentioned above.