When you log into a computer at the library, you hope that this won't expose you to any unnecessary security threats. If a hacker can somehow intercept that session - catch it while it is still up, or get a hold of the login credentials - then the user's data is at risk.Ī simple example involves the use of a public computer to connect to confidential resources. A user authenticates to a server by typing identifying information into an input screen on his or her own client computer. How many times have you been told to keep your login information secure, to use strong passwords, and to completely log out when you're done? Preventing bad guys from accessing confidential sites and services by using your ID and password is a no-brainer - but it still happens.Ī session is a period of communication between two computers that lasts for a finite period of time. This vulnerability is so obvious that it might even be overlooked. This keeps the hacker from causing Kills codes to break into a system by the injection of special characters.įor more information on the injection vulnerability and how to combat it, see OWASP's description of the flaw, as well as their SQL Injection Prevention Cheat Sheet. This uses specific escape syntax to prevent the software command interpreter from recognizing special characters. Either way, validation should be considered for inclusion in any code that depends on user input.Īnother common coding security approach is called escaping. Whitelisting limits input to only permitted characters. Blacklisting involves keeping undesired, potentially malicious characters from being entered into a query response. As described by Cisco, blacklisting and whitelisting are two good ways to keep injection attackers at bay. ![]() Input validation is one of the best defenses against an injection hack. But a good programmer can prevent the attack with judicious coding security. It's a neat trick, and the computer is none the wiser. Since 1=1 is always true, the computational result of the query is simply a list of all the users in the database table. Once it sees the OR in the query, it logically forgets about the first part and just returns TRUE for the second part. What does the computer do? Well, it dutifully complies with the logical request. To trick the application, the hacker inputs the following: 105 OR 1=1 Here's how a piece of code querying a user id might look: As Computerphile expert Tom Scott tells us, "Any time you have to enter information or retrieve information using a website, it's interacting with SQL." SQL injection occurs when a hacker uses an attack string to input malicious commands or query and extract data from a confidential database.Īn explanation from W3Schools illustrates how a hacker might try to find out all the users of a particular application. Structured query language (SQL) is the usual way for front-end web pages to communicate with backend databases. When you think of this web application security issue, one of the first attacks that comes to mind is SQL Injection. Injection vulnerabilities can apply to various codes: ![]() According to OWASP's description of the hack, injection flaws are "very prevalent," but they are also easy to discover. This is a fairly common exploit that can be easy to implement on software that is not adequately protected. Unless you buy into the far-fetched idea that somehow they can think for themselves, computers only do precisely what you tell them to do.Īnd if an attacker manages to intrude upon a software programmer's space and make his software do something for which it was never designed, then it is just a matter of a machine dutifully following the instructions it is given, however malicious. Of course, it's not the computer's fault. Injection is when a hacker sends untrusted data to trick a computer into executing an unauthorized command or allowing illegitimate access to data. Here, we discuss the OWASP Top Ten, a list put together by the Open Web Application Security Project that deals with some of the most common methods hackers use to penetrate and disrupt networks, as well as some of the common weaknesses that plague us. But with the current application-centric internet, vulnerabilities are more prevalent in web applications than on some Layer 2 protocol link. In the early days of the internet, the focus was on protecting connections in a rather elementary way. ![]() As network technology develops, so do the skills of those who seek to undermine it. Security threats are happening at levels never before conceived and as more applications are developed, the threats compound.
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