We’re roughly halfway through this series on basic security steps for Startups to take. After introducing the series, we then covered Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and then Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF).

SQLi - SQL Injection

What?

SQL injection vulnerabilities allow an attacker to modify a SQL query in your app to perform an unintended and undesired action.

Real Example

Imagine we have a search page in our app. Here, we’re allowing people to search for types of food replaced by SPAM in Insta-SPAM.

<form action="/search" method="POST">
  <input type="text" name="term">
  <button type="submit">Search</button>
</form>

And in our form submission controller, we have this:

$term = $_POST["term"];
$sql = "SELECT * FROM photos WHERE description LIKE '%" . $term . "%'";
$res = mysql_query($sql);

When our nice, kind users are enhancing their mood with Insta-SPAM, they might search for instances of Burgers being replaced by tins of Spam, by entering “Burgers” in the search box. Here’s what the SQL query looks like when we execute it:

SELECT * FROM photos WHERE description LIKE '%Burgers%';

Now consider our Naughty Hacker visiting Insta-SPAM and entering this in the search form:

cheese%'; DROP TABLE photos; DROP TABLE customers; DROP TABLE users; --

I’m sure you know where we’re going with this but this is the SQL created that we then run:

SELECT * FROM photos WHERE description LIKE '%cheese%'; DROP TABLE photos; DROP TABLE customers; DROP TABLE users; --%';

NH has dropped our photos table! All that day-making content, GONE! He/she has had a stab at dropping our customers and users tables - we’ve probably stored our user base in one of those right?!

So, to prevent this catastrophic series of events, use parameterized queries where supported, make sure you validate, sanitize and escape where necessary, and never, ever, use string concatenation to build SQL queries!

Why you should care

Data loss is catastrophic. Loss of data integrity is dangerous. And if you let an attacker run whatever SQL they like on your database, you give them a free pass to do whatever they want with one of your most critical assets.

Also remember to be smart about the permissions you grant to the database user that the app uses. Does your user that runs select queries to power your search need to have privileges to drop tables? NO!

And… no, you don’t need reminding about this one. Right? You’re not running your production database access from your publicly available app as… root? Right? Of course you’re not. DON’T RUN AS ROOT.

Purely using a NoSQL solution for data storage? Awesome! I love redis, I like couchDB and I’ve heard Mongo’s a hoot. No need to worry about SQL injection then eh! Well, yes, if we’re being pedantic you will not be at risk to SQL injection. But these hackers are industrious and love to learn. They are well aware of what can be done with NoSQL too. VALIDATE. SANITIZE. ESCAPE.

How to detect if someone is trying to attack you

Log the input to form controllers and anywhere that accepts user input, then look for patterns that match SQL statements. It’s not a difficult task to write a regex that looks for the types of queries that will cause you problems.

Non-security benefits of protecting yourself from this threat

Ensuring you are constructing queries correctly is good programming practice, and maintaining the correct level of permissions/privileges for database users is just good sense.

End of Part 4

Your data is critically important to you and to those whom it pertains to - so taking steps to ensure the easiest way an attacker can steal that data is mitigated is an important part of this effort. In part 5, we’ll look at the threat of Spammers - and how to stop yourself from becoming a weapon in their arsenal.

And, as a reminder - I will continue to repeat a disclaimer throughout: This is a barebones, do this rather than do nothing set of suggested approaches. THIS DOES NOT CONSTITUTE ROBUST, COMPLETE AND FOOLPROOF SECURITY. The goal of this effort is to provide non-security aware founders/hackers/developers/etc with a modicum of protection at a stage in the company’s growth where there are no budgets, let alone one for Information Security. The caveat is that as soon as the company experiences growth, one of their top priorities should be to mature in to a properly developed, professionally and thoroughly provisioned Information Security program, specific to their application, industry and environment.

Just as you scaffold certain items while doing rapid coding development, this is your scaffolded application security program. Think of it as the Twitter Bootstrap of web application security.

Your Feedback / Dissent

In creating this, my aim is to improve Application Security in the early stage companies that will often consider the topic "something we'll get to when we scale". As such, critiques, comments, dissenting opinions and any other type of feedback is welcomed and indeed, heartily encouraged.

Constructive feedback will be reflected in the posts themselves at the most relevant points.

If you've got feedback for me, or you have questions about how to apply this to your own startup / project, you can get in touch:

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Email: [email protected]