SQLi – How it works (Part 1)

In this 6 part series on SQLi (SQL Injection) we shall be describing the vulnerability and its variants, showing how it works and what an attacker can do with it.

SQL injection (SQLi) refers to an injection attack wherein an attacker can execute malicious SQL statements (also commonly referred to as a malicious payload) that control a web application’s database server (also commonly referred to as a Relational Database Management System – RDBMS). Since an SQL injection vulnerability could possibly affect any website or web application that makes use of an SQL-based database, the vulnerability is one of the oldest, most prevalent and most dangerous of web application vulnerabilities.

By leveraging an SQLi vulnerability, given the right circumstances, an attacker can use it to bypass a web application’s authentication and authorization mechanisms and retrieve the contents of an entire database. SQL injection can also be used to add, modify and delete records in a database, affecting data integrity.

To such an extent, SQL injection can provide an attacker with unauthorized access to sensitive data including, customer data, personally identifiable information (PII), trade secrets, intellectual property and other sensitive information.

How SQLi works

In order to run malicious SQL queries against a database server, an attacker must first find an input within the web application that is included inside of an SQL query.

In order for an SQL injection attack to take place, the vulnerable website needs to directly include user input within an SQL statement. An attacker can then insert a payload that will be included as part of the SQL query and run against the database server.

The following server-side pseudo-code is used to authenticate users to the web application.

# Define POST variables
uname = request.POST['username']
passwd = request.POST['password']

# SQL query vulnerable to SQLi
sql = “SELECT id FROM users WHERE username=’” + uname + “’ AND password=’” + passwd + “’”

# Execute the SQL statement
database.execute(sql)

The above script is a simple example of authenticating a user with a username and a password against a database with a table named users, and a username and password column.

The above script is vulnerable to SQL injection because an attacker could submit malicious input in such a way that would alter the SQL statement being executed by the database server.

A simple example of an SQL injection payload could be something as simple as setting the password field to password’ OR 1=1.

This would result in the following SQL query being run against the database server.

SELECT id FROM users WHERE username=’username’ AND password=’password’ OR 1=1’

An attacker can also comment out the rest of the SQL statement to control the execution of the SQL query further.

-- MySQL, MSSQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite
' OR '1'='1' --
' OR '1'='1' /*
-- MySQL
' OR '1'='1' #
-- Access (using null characters)
' OR '1'='1' %00
' OR '1'='1' %16

Once the query executes, the result is returned to the application to be processed, resulting in an authentication bypass. In the event of authentication bypass being possible, the application will most likely log the attacker in with the first account from the query result – the first account in a database is usually of an administrative user.

THE AUTHOR

Ian Muscat

Ian Muscat used to be a technical resource and speaker for Acunetix. More recently, his work centers around cloud security and phishing simulation.