Book Image

SQL Injection Strategies

By : Ettore Galluccio, Edoardo Caselli, Gabriele Lombari
Book Image

SQL Injection Strategies

By: Ettore Galluccio, Edoardo Caselli, Gabriele Lombari

Overview of this book

SQL injection (SQLi) is probably the most infamous attack that can be unleashed against applications on the internet. SQL Injection Strategies is an end-to-end guide for beginners looking to learn how to perform SQL injection and test the security of web applications, websites, or databases, using both manual and automated techniques. The book serves as both a theoretical and practical guide to take you through the important aspects of SQL injection, both from an attack and a defense perspective. You’ll start with a thorough introduction to SQL injection and its impact on websites and systems. Later, the book features steps to configure a virtual environment, so you can try SQL injection techniques safely on your own computer. These tests can be performed not only on web applications but also on web services and mobile applications that can be used for managing IoT environments. Tools such as sqlmap and others are then covered, helping you understand how to use them effectively to perform SQL injection attacks. By the end of this book, you will be well-versed with SQL injection, from both the attack and defense perspective.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
1
Section 1: (No)SQL Injection in Theory
4
Section 2: SQL Injection in Practice

Security implications of SQL

As we've seen, SQL allows us to perform a very large set of instructions, making interacting with the whole database possible at many different levels. We can do this by modifying its structure too. With such a powerful language that can be used to perform any sort of operation on a database, it is natural to start wondering, what could go wrong? With a vast array of possible statements and operations, of course, a malicious attacker could have a wide selection of tools that could be used to damage databases, stored data, and applications using such data, in different ways. One simple instruction, such as DROP DATABASE <database name>, for example, could entirely compromise the functionality of an application that relies on databases to query data or even authentication data (that is, usernames and passwords).

For this reason, SQL code is never, at least directly, conceived to be interacted with inside an application. Instead, it is the application...