A potential addition to the Grails framework to promote secure data binding.

Description.txt

Crucially, a class with an empty or missing dataBindable property would not be processed at all by bindData or other batch updating mechanisms. This is a harsh breaking change, but makes it clear that the developer must think about security. Since it is a breaking change, there should be a configurable "legacy mode" that could be configured to "true" to enable old behavior for all objects, or it could also be configured to a list of classes or namespaces to enable gradual migration. "dateCreated" and "lastUpdated" should never be updated via bindData or similar.

User.groovy

class User {  
    //Fields listed here would not be processed bindData, or new User(params)  
    static dataBindable = ["username", "firstName", "lastName"]  
      
    String username  
    String firstName  
    String lastName  
   
    boolean isActive = false  
    int failedPasswordAttemptCount = 0  
   
    Date dateCreated  
    Date lastUpdated  
  
    static constraints = {  
        //strict constraints go here  
    }  
}