subnets

Subnets

Subnets is a C-extension for Ruby with IPv4 and IPv6 address and network classes. The motivating goal is to provide a fast test whether a given set of subnets includes a given IP.

Subnets.include?(subnets, '192.168.1.1')

Rack::Request#ip and ActionDispatch::Request#remote_ip perform such a test. ActionDispatch, which uses ipaddr by default, explicitly calls out that the technique is too slow to run on every request. Rack uses a regular expression of IPv4 and IPv6 private address spaces which, while comparably fast, is not easily extended to support arbitrary subnets.

(See also this answer explaining request.ip vs. request.remote_ip)

A benchmark tests if a random IP (75% private IPs) is within any of the private IPv4 ranges. Lower is better. Plotted on logscale. (Ruby 2.5.0p0, 2.5 GHz Intel Core i7).

$ bundle exec rake benchmark TEST=test/private_networks_benchmark
    
 ipaddr         : 46.25μs/ip ██████████████████████████████████▋
 ipaddress      : 63.88μs/ip ██████████████████████████████████████▏
 netaddr        : 31.03μs/ip ██████████████████████████████▎
*subnets        :  4.19μs/ip ████████▏
 rack (regexp)  :  5.25μs/ip ██████████▋
                             '         '       '      '         '
                             2         5       10     20        50

Usage

require 'subnets'

subnets = %w(127.0.0.1/32 10.0.0.0/8 172.16.0.0/12 192.168.0.0/16
  ::1/128 fc00::/7).map(&Subnets.method(:parse))

Subnets.include?(subnets, '192.168.1.1') #=> true
Subnets.include?(subnets, '203.0.113.12') #=> false

Similar Gems

There are several IP gems, all of which are implemented in pure-Ruby and not performance oriented.

• ipaddr: (Ruby stdlib) A set of methods to manipulate an IP address. Both IPv4 and IPv6 are supported.
• ipaddress: A Ruby library designed to make the use of IPv4 and IPv6 addresses simple, powerful and enjoyable. It provides a complete set of methods to handle IP addresses for any need, from simple scripting to full network design.
• netaddr: A Ruby library for performing calculations on IPv4 and IPv6 subnets. There is also limited support for EUI addresses.

Production Ready?

This has not been used in production.

Safe?

The IPv4 and IPv6 parsers are written in C. In addition to the unit test suite, the parsers have had minimal (16+ hours) of fuzzing with American fuzzy lop. There is medium confidence that the parsers will not read out-of-bounds.

Correct?

The unit test suite tests parsing of a variety of valid and invalid IPv4 and IPv6 networks.

Fast?

Yes, for checking if an array of subnets includes a given IP at least.