CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2017/E1784 Fix mass assignments reported by Brakeman.rb
Expertiza Background
Expertiza is a web application where students can submit and peer-review learning objects (articles, code, web sites, etc). It is used in select courses at NC State and by professors at several other colleges and universities.
Project Description
With the help of mass assignment, when we create or update certain object, we do not need to write an assignment statement for each attribute. But mass assignment could cause security vulnerabilities. Hackers could add other parameters to do some bad things. Rails 4 introduces strong parameters, which is a new approach to protect mass assignment. So our group needs to resolve all these "Unprotected mass assignment" issues according to Brakeman report.
Implementation
Problem 1: Potentially dangerous attribute available for mass assignment
Previsouly, only two attributes :parent_id, :node_object_id are protected. So we removed the two attributes so that all attributes in all models will be mass assignment protected.
Problem 2: Mass assignment is not restricted using attr_accessible
If there was no protection at all in the model file. We just added "attr_acessible".
Problem 3: Unprotected mass assignment
We modified the code in an unobtrusive way, i.e. processing the mass assignment parameters with a function without changing them directly.
Parameters come from requests
Fix unprotected mass assignment in update
Fix unprotected mass assignment in new
Parameters come from other objects
Fix unprotected mass assignment in create
Fix unprotected mass assignment in new
