Detection and Prevention of SQL Injection Attacks

We depend on database-driven web applications for an ever increasing amount of activities, such as banking and shopping. When performing such activities, we entrust our personal information to these web applications and their underlying databases. The confidentiality and integrity of this information is far from guaranteed; web applications are often vulnerable to attacks, which can give an attacker complete access to the application's underlying database. SQL injection is a type of code-injection attack in which an attacker uses specially crafted inputs to trick the database into executing attacker-specified database commands. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the various types of SQL injection attacks and present AMNESIA, a technique for automatically detecting and preventing SQL injection attacks. AMNESIA uses static analysis to build a model of the legitimate queries an application can generate and then, at runtime, checks that all queries generated by the appUcation comply with this model. We also present an extensive empirical evaluation of AMNESIA. The results of our evaluation indicate that AMNESIA is, at least for the cases considered, highly effective and efficient in detecting and preventing SQL injection attacks.