Less magic. The more magic, unexpected behavior you have when parsing untrusted input, the more likely you are to have security holes. Instead of building up

Less magic. The more magic, unexpected behavior you have when parsing untrusted input, the more likely you are to have security holes. Instead of building up some complex object based on untrusted input, the author of the application should specify the values and types expected, and the parser should parse those and nothing more. This would lead to much simpler code paths, as the user never has an object that has unexpected keys, values, behaviors, etc. Don't parse the object using complex, general purpose code, then hand the user an object that they have to treat specially; if their form only expects 5 values of given types, then parse only those values and those types. The problem is, all of this kind of magic is at the very heart of what Rails is. I don't know if you could eliminate it all and still have Rails be Rails.