Member-only story

Strong Parameters in Ruby on Rails

Guide to Implementing Strong Parameters for Enhanced Security and Data Integrity

Patrick Karsh
3 min readDec 12, 2023

Strong Parameters is a feature in Ruby on Rails that provides an interface for protecting attributes from end-user assignment. This feature is particularly important in preventing mass-assignment vulnerabilities.

What are Strong Parameters?

In earlier versions of Rails, parameters for Active Record models were protected using the attr_accessible and attr_protected methods. However, Rails 4 introduced Strong Parameters to give a more flexible way to control which parameters should be allowed for mass updating.

Do your parameters even lift?

Why Use Strong Parameters?

The primary reason to use Strong Parameters is to prevent mass-assignment vulnerabilities. This type of security issue occurs when a user can set model attributes that they shouldn’t be able to modify. By explicitly declaring which parameters are permitted, developers can ensure that only the intended attributes can be changed.

How to Use Strong Parameters

Require and Permit: In your Rails controller, use the require method to specify which model the parameters should belong to, and the permit method to specify which…

--

--

Patrick Karsh
Patrick Karsh

Written by Patrick Karsh

NYC-based Ruby on Rails and Javascript Engineer leveraging AI to explore Engineering. https://linktr.ee/patrickkarsh

No responses yet