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

SQL injection – practice in perspective

For our practical part, we set up a safe environment so that we didn't cause problems for any external entities through our testing – this way simulating as if we were testing a real system belonging to us – identifying and exploiting SQL injection specifically. After dealing with probably the most fun aspect in the practical part, we described what can be done to prevent SQL injection from happening.

Attacking using SQL injection

Let's review the tests we performed on the targets we selected and go through the techniques we put into practice.

Manual techniques

By taking advantage of the OWASP BWA project, we have been able to explore most of the attack techniques we have previously seen in the theory section. This was made possible by us selecting three specific web applications, against which we could try a wide spectrum of SQL injection attacks.

Our first target was the Mutillidae II web application...