homepage
Open menu
Go one level top
  • Train and Certify
    Train and Certify

    Immediately apply the skills and techniques learned in SANS courses, ranges, and summits

    • Overview
    • Courses
      • Overview
      • Full Course List
      • By Focus Areas
        • Cloud Security
        • Cyber Defense
        • Cybersecurity and IT Essentials
        • DFIR
        • Industrial Control Systems
        • Offensive Operations
        • Management, Legal, and Audit
      • By Skill Levels
        • New to Cyber
        • Essentials
        • Advanced
        • Expert
      • Training Formats
        • OnDemand
        • In-Person
        • Live Online
      • Course Demos
    • Training Roadmaps
      • Skills Roadmap
      • Focus Area Job Roles
        • Cyber Defence Job Roles
        • Offensive Operations Job Roles
        • DFIR Job Roles
        • Cloud Job Roles
        • ICS Job Roles
        • Leadership Job Roles
      • NICE Framework
        • Security Provisionals
        • Operate and Maintain
        • Oversee and Govern
        • Protect and Defend
        • Analyze
        • Collect and Operate
        • Investigate
        • Industrial Control Systems
    • GIAC Certifications
    • Training Events & Summits
      • Events Overview
      • Event Locations
        • Asia
        • Australia & New Zealand
        • Latin America
        • Mainland Europe
        • Middle East & Africa
        • Scandinavia
        • United Kingdom & Ireland
        • United States & Canada
      • Summits
    • OnDemand
    • Get Started in Cyber
      • Overview
      • Degree and Certificate Programs
      • Scholarships
    • Cyber Ranges
  • Manage Your Team
    Manage Your Team

    Build a world-class cyber team with our workforce development programs

    • Overview
    • Why Work with SANS
    • Group Purchasing
    • Build Your Team
      • Team Development
      • Assessments
      • Private Training
      • Hire Cyber Professionals
      • By Industry
        • Health Care
        • Industrial Control Systems Security
        • Military
    • Leadership Training
  • Security Awareness
    Security Awareness

    Increase your staff’s cyber awareness, help them change their behaviors, and reduce your organizational risk

    • Overview
    • Products & Services
      • Security Awareness Training
        • EndUser Training
        • Phishing Platform
      • Specialized
        • Developer Training
        • ICS Engineer Training
        • NERC CIP Training
        • IT Administrator
      • Risk Assessments
        • Knowledge Assessment
        • Culture Assessment
        • Behavioral Risk Assessment
    • OUCH! Newsletter
    • Career Development
      • Overview
      • Training & Courses
      • Professional Credential
    • Blog
    • Partners
    • Reports & Case Studies
  • Resources
    Resources

    Enhance your skills with access to thousands of free resources, 150+ instructor-developed tools, and the latest cybersecurity news and analysis

    • Overview
    • Webcasts
    • Free Cybersecurity Events
      • Free Events Overview
      • Summits
      • Solutions Forums
      • Community Nights
    • Content
      • Newsletters
        • NewsBites
        • @RISK
        • OUCH! Newsletter
      • Blog
      • Podcasts
      • Summit Presentations
      • Posters & Cheat Sheets
    • Research
      • White Papers
      • Security Policies
    • Tools
    • Focus Areas
      • Cyber Defense
      • Cloud Security
      • Digital Forensics & Incident Response
      • Industrial Control Systems
      • Cyber Security Leadership
      • Offensive Operations
  • Get Involved
    Get Involved

    Help keep the cyber community one step ahead of threats. Join the SANS community or begin your journey of becoming a SANS Certified Instructor today.

    • Overview
    • Join the Community
    • Work Study
    • Teach for SANS
    • CISO Network
    • Partnerships
    • Sponsorship Opportunities
  • About
    About

    Learn more about how SANS empowers and educates current and future cybersecurity practitioners with knowledge and skills

    • SANS
      • Overview
      • Our Founder
      • Awards
    • Instructors
      • Our Instructors
      • Full Instructor List
    • Mission
      • Our Mission
      • Diversity
      • Scholarships
    • Contact
      • Contact Customer Service
      • Contact Sales
      • Press & Media Enquiries
    • Frequent Asked Questions
    • Customer Reviews
    • Press
    • Careers
  • Contact Sales
  • SANS Sites
    • GIAC Security Certifications
    • Internet Storm Center
    • SANS Technology Institute
    • Security Awareness Training
  • Search
  • Log In
  • Join
    • Account Dashboard
    • Log Out
  1. Home >
  2. Blog >
  3. Top 25 Series - Rank 2 - SQL Injection
370x370_Frank-Kim.jpg
Frank Kim

Top 25 Series - Rank 2 - SQL Injection

March 1, 2010

Item #2 in this year's Top 25 is CWE-89 [1]. It is officially called Improper Sanitization of Special Elements used in an SQL Command ('SQL Injection').

There are many public examples that show the devastating impact that SQL Injection can have including the Mass SQL Injection attacks that began in 2008 [2,3,4] as well as the recent SQL Injection vulnerability in RockYou that led to the disclosure of 32 million plaintext passwords [5,6].

SQL Injection occurs when your SQL statements are created dynamically without appropriate encoding or escaping. Despite its prevalence, SQL Injection is very easy to address at a code level. One of the best ways to prevent SQL Injection is to make sure that you use parameterized queries correctly. This post uses Java for illustration purposes. The PreparedStatement class is Java's implementation of a parameterized query. You can use it in the following manner to prevent SQL Injection:

// GOOD code that prevents SQL Injection
String query = "SELECT id FROM users WHERE userid = ?";
PreparedStatement stmt = con.prepareStatement(query);
stmt.setString(1, userid);
ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery();

However, it is important to keep in mind that a PreparedStatement can still be used incorrectly. The following code creates a SQL statement using string concatenation and does not use bind variables.

// BAD code that is still vulnerable to SQL Injection
String query = "SELECT id FROM users WHERE userid = '" + userid + "'";
PreparedStatement stmt = con.prepareStatement(query);
ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery();

Additionally, to ensure that the PreparedStatement class prevents SQL Injection, you must be using a correctly implemented JDBC driver. A buggy driver can negate the benefits of correctly using a PreparedStatement. Fortunately, I don't know of any such bugs in the major JDBC drivers that are being used but would love to hear about it if you have.

In some special cases you may not want to use a PreparedStatement at all. In those cases you can manually encode the input for your specific database. Fortunately, ESAPI [7] provides an encodeForSQL method in the Encoder class that can be used for just this purpose. However, PreparedStatements are the preferred approach since manually doing this encoding may open you up to potential attacks. Chris Shiflett had a great post about multi-byte characters, character encoding, and escaping for MySQL that still allowed SQL Injection [8].

If you happen to be using an object/relational mapping tool like Hibernate you must still take care not to create your queries dynamically. Instead of creating your Hibernate queries using string concatenation you must create them using Hibernate's binding syntax (i.e. using a colon like :value).

Stored procedures are also vulnerable to SQL Injection if they are not coded correctly. In Java, stored procedures are called using the CallableStatement class. It may appear that you're not creating dynamic queries in your Java code, but if the backend stored procedure code is via an "execute" call, then you're still vulnerable to SQL Injection.

In addition to writing secure code as we've described you should also limit the privileges that are assigned to the account which is being used to connect to the database. You can even do all your database access from stored procedures and only grant your application database account access only to these stored procedures. That way, an attacker will only ever have access to call the stored procedures themselves. However, in many large organizations DBAs control stored procedure code and it may not be convenient for developers who are in a separate organization to depend on an external party to maintain their database queries.

  1. http://cwe.mitre.org/top25/#CWE-89
  2. http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=1059
  3. http://securitylabs.websense.com/content/Alerts/3070.aspx
  4. http://www.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00001427.html
  5. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/rockyou-hacked/
  6. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/14/rockyou-hack-security-myspace-facebook-passwords/
  7. http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Enterprise_Security_API
  8. http://shiflett.org/blog/2006/jan/addslashes-versus-mysql-real-escape-string
Share:
TwitterLinkedInFacebook
Copy url Url was copied to clipboard
Subscribe to SANS Newsletters
Receive curated news, vulnerabilities, & security awareness tips
United States
Canada
United Kingdom
Spain
Belgium
Denmark
Norway
Netherlands
Australia
India
Japan
Singapore
Afghanistan
Aland Islands
Albania
Algeria
American Samoa
Andorra
Angola
Anguilla
Antarctica
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Armenia
Aruba
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belize
Benin
Bermuda
Bhutan
Bolivia
Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba
Bosnia And Herzegovina
Botswana
Bouvet Island
Brazil
British Indian Ocean Territory
Brunei Darussalam
Bulgaria
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cambodia
Cameroon
Cape Verde
Cayman Islands
Central African Republic
Chad
Chile
China
Christmas Island
Cocos (Keeling) Islands
Colombia
Comoros
Cook Islands
Costa Rica
Croatia (Local Name: Hrvatska)
Curacao
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Dominica
Dominican Republic
East Timor
East Timor
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Falkland Islands (Malvinas)
Faroe Islands
Fiji
Finland
France
French Guiana
French Polynesia
French Southern Territories
Gabon
Gambia
Georgia
Germany
Ghana
Gibraltar
Greece
Greenland
Grenada
Guadeloupe
Guam
Guatemala
Guernsey
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Guyana
Haiti
Heard And McDonald Islands
Honduras
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Iraq
Ireland
Isle of Man
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Jersey
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kiribati
Korea, Republic Of
Kosovo
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Lao People's Democratic Republic
Latvia
Lebanon
Lesotho
Liberia
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Macau
Macedonia
Madagascar
Malawi
Malaysia
Maldives
Mali
Malta
Marshall Islands
Martinique
Mauritania
Mauritius
Mayotte
Mexico
Micronesia, Federated States Of
Moldova, Republic Of
Monaco
Mongolia
Montenegro
Montserrat
Morocco
Mozambique
Myanmar
Namibia
Nauru
Nepal
Netherlands Antilles
New Caledonia
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
Niue
Norfolk Island
Northern Mariana Islands
Oman
Pakistan
Palau
Palestine
Panama
Papua New Guinea
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Pitcairn
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Qatar
Reunion
Romania
Russian Federation
Rwanda
Saint Bartholemy
Saint Kitts And Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Martin
Saint Vincent And The Grenadines
Samoa
San Marino
Sao Tome And Principe
Saudi Arabia
Senegal
Serbia
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Sint Maarten
Slovakia
Slovenia
Solomon Islands
South Africa
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
South Sudan
Sri Lanka
St. Helena
St. Pierre And Miquelon
Suriname
Svalbard And Jan Mayen Islands
Swaziland
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Tajikistan
Tanzania
Thailand
Togo
Tokelau
Tonga
Trinidad And Tobago
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Turks And Caicos Islands
Tuvalu
Uganda
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United States Minor Outlying Islands
Uruguay
Uzbekistan
Vanuatu
Vatican City
Venezuela
Vietnam
Virgin Islands (British)
Virgin Islands (U.S.)
Wallis And Futuna Islands
Western Sahara
Yemen
Yugoslavia
Zambia
Zimbabwe

By providing this information, you agree to the processing of your personal data by SANS as described in our Privacy Policy.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Tags:
  • DevSecOps

Related Content

Blog
powershell_option_340x340.jpg
Cyber Defense, DevSecOps, Digital Forensics and Incident Response, Cybersecurity and IT Essentials, Penetration Testing and Red Teaming
July 15, 2022
Month of PowerShell: Working with PowerShell Log Files
In this article we'll look at how we can leverage PowerShell's object-passing pipeline to parse and retrieve data from an IIS web server log file.
370x370_Joshua-Wright.jpg
Joshua Wright
read more
Blog
CloudSecNext Summit Visual Summary
Cloud Security, DevSecOps
May 3, 2022
A Visual Summary of SANS CloudSecNext Summit 2022
On May 3-4, thousands from around the globe tuned in for the SANS CloudSecNext Summit. We invited Ashton Rodenhiser to create graphic recordings of our Summit presentations. If you missed a talk or are looking to view the SANS CloudSecNext Summit through a visual lens, take a look at the recordings...
370x370-person-placeholder.png
Alison Kim
read more
Blog
DevSecOps
May 4, 2015
2015 State of Application Security: Closing the Gap
The 2015 SANS State of Application Security Analyst Paper and webcasts are complete. This year, Jim Bird, the lead author of the SANS Application Security Survey series, Frank Kim, and I all participated in writing the questions, analyzing the results, drafting the paper, and preparing the webcast...
Eric_Johnson_370x370.png
Eric Johnson
read more
  • Register to Learn
  • Courses
  • Certifications
  • Degree Programs
  • Cyber Ranges
  • Job Tools
  • Security Policy Project
  • Posters & Cheat Sheets
  • White Papers
  • Focus Areas
  • Cyber Defense
  • Cloud Security
  • Cybersecurity Leadership
  • Digital Forensics
  • Industrial Control Systems
  • Offensive Operations
Subscribe to SANS Newsletters
Receive curated news, vulnerabilities, & security awareness tips
United States
Canada
United Kingdom
Spain
Belgium
Denmark
Norway
Netherlands
Australia
India
Japan
Singapore
Afghanistan
Aland Islands
Albania
Algeria
American Samoa
Andorra
Angola
Anguilla
Antarctica
Antigua and Barbuda
Argentina
Armenia
Aruba
Austria
Azerbaijan
Bahamas
Bahrain
Bangladesh
Barbados
Belarus
Belize
Benin
Bermuda
Bhutan
Bolivia
Bonaire, Sint Eustatius, and Saba
Bosnia And Herzegovina
Botswana
Bouvet Island
Brazil
British Indian Ocean Territory
Brunei Darussalam
Bulgaria
Burkina Faso
Burundi
Cambodia
Cameroon
Cape Verde
Cayman Islands
Central African Republic
Chad
Chile
China
Christmas Island
Cocos (Keeling) Islands
Colombia
Comoros
Cook Islands
Costa Rica
Croatia (Local Name: Hrvatska)
Curacao
Cyprus
Czech Republic
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Djibouti
Dominica
Dominican Republic
East Timor
East Timor
Ecuador
Egypt
El Salvador
Equatorial Guinea
Eritrea
Estonia
Ethiopia
Falkland Islands (Malvinas)
Faroe Islands
Fiji
Finland
France
French Guiana
French Polynesia
French Southern Territories
Gabon
Gambia
Georgia
Germany
Ghana
Gibraltar
Greece
Greenland
Grenada
Guadeloupe
Guam
Guatemala
Guernsey
Guinea
Guinea-Bissau
Guyana
Haiti
Heard And McDonald Islands
Honduras
Hong Kong
Hungary
Iceland
Indonesia
Iraq
Ireland
Isle of Man
Israel
Italy
Jamaica
Jersey
Jordan
Kazakhstan
Kenya
Kiribati
Korea, Republic Of
Kosovo
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Lao People's Democratic Republic
Latvia
Lebanon
Lesotho
Liberia
Liechtenstein
Lithuania
Luxembourg
Macau
Macedonia
Madagascar
Malawi
Malaysia
Maldives
Mali
Malta
Marshall Islands
Martinique
Mauritania
Mauritius
Mayotte
Mexico
Micronesia, Federated States Of
Moldova, Republic Of
Monaco
Mongolia
Montenegro
Montserrat
Morocco
Mozambique
Myanmar
Namibia
Nauru
Nepal
Netherlands Antilles
New Caledonia
New Zealand
Nicaragua
Niger
Nigeria
Niue
Norfolk Island
Northern Mariana Islands
Oman
Pakistan
Palau
Palestine
Panama
Papua New Guinea
Paraguay
Peru
Philippines
Pitcairn
Poland
Portugal
Puerto Rico
Qatar
Reunion
Romania
Russian Federation
Rwanda
Saint Bartholemy
Saint Kitts And Nevis
Saint Lucia
Saint Martin
Saint Vincent And The Grenadines
Samoa
San Marino
Sao Tome And Principe
Saudi Arabia
Senegal
Serbia
Seychelles
Sierra Leone
Sint Maarten
Slovakia
Slovenia
Solomon Islands
South Africa
South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
South Sudan
Sri Lanka
St. Helena
St. Pierre And Miquelon
Suriname
Svalbard And Jan Mayen Islands
Swaziland
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Tajikistan
Tanzania
Thailand
Togo
Tokelau
Tonga
Trinidad And Tobago
Tunisia
Turkey
Turkmenistan
Turks And Caicos Islands
Tuvalu
Uganda
Ukraine
United Arab Emirates
United States Minor Outlying Islands
Uruguay
Uzbekistan
Vanuatu
Vatican City
Venezuela
Vietnam
Virgin Islands (British)
Virgin Islands (U.S.)
Wallis And Futuna Islands
Western Sahara
Yemen
Yugoslavia
Zambia
Zimbabwe

By providing this information, you agree to the processing of your personal data by SANS as described in our Privacy Policy.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
  • © 2023 SANS™ Institute
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact
  • Careers
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Youtube
  • LinkedIn