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

Understanding general weaknesses and SQL injection enablers

SQL is an immensely powerful and effective tool for interacting with relational databases as it provides an opportunity to perform various tasks through the wide array of functions and commands available. Unfortunately, from a security standpoint, this boon is also a bane; allowing access to many different types of operations means that if no control is in place, anyone could potentially turn an application that utilizes databases on its head, leaving malicious imagination as the only limit to what attackers could achieve.

You saw firsthand what a vulnerable application can lead to (and we hope you also had fun in the process) in the previous chapter, and if you've reached this point in the book, you may also be wondering whether there's any way to improve security to prevent all of this. SQL databases are still extensively used today, so you can probably guess that the short answer is definitely yes. The long...