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

Defending against SQL injection – code-level defenses

As we said earlier, applying code-level defenses, if done correctly, should foil all the plans of a malicious agent that wishes to attack your application. Of course, mistakes can always be made, and that is why the wisest thing to do is to apply various defense mechanisms all at once. In this section, we will explore the main tools at our disposal to thwart possible attacks against our application in terms of SQL injection. We will also see how these controls can be implemented into actual code in three common programming languages for developing web applications: Java, PHP, and .NET.

Input validation

Input validation is the process of accepting or rejecting input based on its content. We only want safe input to be processed by our application, preventing most of the attacks against us. So, only valid input, according to our rules, is accepted and processed by our application.

Validation follows two main approaches...