The problem is, the fact that you don't use mass assignment is by far the exception rather than the rule. Every notable Rails tutorial uses mass assignment. Eve

The problem is, the fact that you don't use mass assignment is by far the exception rather than the rule. Every notable Rails tutorial uses mass assignment. Every person using InheritedResources is using mass assignment. GitHub is using mass assignment. Passing in params more or less raw from the controller, and leaving cleansing and validation up to the model is as strong an idiom as there is in Rails. Regarding your ActiveRecord example, I would totally agree that there was a hole if the standard approach to running SQL was to use find_by_sql with string interpolation. Fortunately, that's appropriately viewed as an option of last resort, with appropriate amounts of "here be dragons" around the dangers of calling that method. Meanwhile, tutorials gleefully do mass-assignment, with perhaps a footnote about attr_accessible, which was of course not included for the sake of brevity. It might be worth saying that Rails strictly as a framework does not have a security problem with mass assignment, only a very dangerous tool, but there is certainly a problem with the culture regarding it.