What is cancan?

Cancan is an authorization library for Ruby on Rails applications. It provides a simple and efficient way of managing user permissions and access control. With Cancan, you can define the actions that users can perform on resources such as models, controllers, or views, and specify which users are authorized to perform those actions. Cancan also provides a set of helper methods for enforcing authorization rules, such as checking if a user is allowed to view or edit a specific record.

Cancan is developed and maintained by Ryan Bates, and it is available as an open-source project under the MIT License. It has a large community of contributors and users, and it is widely used in Ruby on Rails applications of various sizes and complexity levels.

Cancan has been designed with security in mind, and it provides various protection mechanisms against common security issues such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF). It also supports integration with popular authentication systems such as Devise and Authlogic, allowing you to easily integrate authentication and authorization in your Rails application.