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I am not familiar with Rails, so I am a bit confused about what caused this. What does it have to do with mass-assignment?

Rails has the ability to protect certain fields from mass-assignment; fields where you don't want the user setting values during POST because they may be able to alter the security of that model.

Assuming this guy is right; the pub key class was allowing any old user to modify the owner_id of the pub key object and change who it belongs to. The pub key class wasn't configured to protect against mass owner_is assignment.

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