I woke up at five this morning with two things in my head.
One was, most unfortunately, Rebecca Black's Friday, except with "Monday" -- you know, "Monday, Monday, gettin' up on Monday, hack, hack, hack, hack, which thing should I hack?", et cetera.
The other was a faint echo of Patrick McKenzie's great article on the practical implications of the recent Rails vulnerabilities. In particular, he pointed out that development web servers running only on your local laptop could be accessed by malicious web pages.
Of course this is not new, strictly speaking, but it was surprising to me in a way that it shouldn't have been. For example, Guile has a command-line argument to run a REPL server on a local port. This is fantastic for interactive development and debugging, but it is also a vulnerability if you run a web server on the same machine. A malicious web page could request data from the default Guile listener port, which is a short hop away from rooting your machine.
I made a little test case this morning: a local port scanner. It tries to fetch http://localhost:port/favicon.ico for all ports between 1 and 10000 on your machine. (You can click that link; it doesn't run the scan until you click a button.)
If it finds a favicon, that indicates that there is a running local web application, which may or may not be vulnerable to CSRF attacks or other attacks like the Rails yaml attack.
If the request for a favicon times out, probably that port is vulnerable to some kind of attack, like the old form protocol attack.
If the request fails, the port may be closed, or the process listening at the port may have detected invalid input and closed the connection. We could run a timing loop to determine if a connection was made or not, but for now the port scanner doesn't output any information for this case.
In my case, the page finds that I have a probably vulnerable port 2628, which appears to be dictd.
Anyway, I hope that page is useful to someone. And if you are adding backdoors into your applications for development purposes, be careful!