The issue
---
When using rack-attack with a rails app, developers expect the request
path to be normalized. In particular, trailing slashes are stripped so
a request path "/login/" becomes "/login" by the time you're in
ActionController.
Since Rack::Attack runs before ActionDispatch, the request path is not
yet normalized. This can cause throttles and blacklists to not work as
expected.
E.g., a throttle:
throttle('logins', ...) {|req| req.path == "/login" }
would not match a request to '/login/', though Rails would route
'/login/' to the same '/login' action.
The solution
---
This patch looks if ActionDispatch's request normalization is loaded,
and if so, uses it to normalize the path before processing throttles,
blacklists, etc.
If it's not loaded, the request path is not modified.
Credit
---
Thanks to Andres Riancho at Include Security for reporting this issue.
