International Journal of Database Management Systems ( IJDMS ) Vol.6, No.1, February 2014
DOI : 10.5121/ijdms.2014.6102 21
A HYBRID TECHNIQUE FOR SQL INJECTION
ATTACKS DETECTION AND PREVENTION
Jalal Omer Atoum and Amer Jibril Qaralleh
Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Amman, Jordan
ABSTRACT
SQL injection is a type of attacks used to gain, manipulate, or delete information in any data-driven system
whether this system is online or offline and whether this system is a web or non-web-based. It is
distinguished by the multiplicity of its performing methods, so defense techniques could not detect or
prevent such attacks. The main objective of this paper is to create a reliable and accurate hybrid technique
that secure systems from being exploited by SQL injection attacks. This hybrid technique combines static
and runtime SQL queries analysis to create a defense strategy that can detect and prevent various types of
SQL injection attacks. To evaluate this suggested technique, a large set of SQL queries have been executed
through a simulation that had been developed. The results indicate that the suggested technique is reliable
and more effective in capturing more SQL injection types compared to other SQL injection detection
methods.
KEYWORDS
Database SQL Injection Atttacks, Static Analysis, Runtime Analysis, Three Tier Architecture.
1. INTRODUCTION
SQL injection attacks (SQLIAs) are very effective system attacks that can be used to gain or
manipulate data in data-driven systems, which is a common problem for web applications that
are published on the internet. Furthrmore, SQLIAs are simple to be learned and simple to be
executed; so they can be executed by unexperienced hackers [16].
There have been many researches that have developed various methods to detect and prevent
SQLIAs. Each of these methods covers an objective or set of objectives related to this type of
attacks, but there is no method that can cover the whole system from being attacked by SQL
injections [6].
The risk of SQLIAs is that when they are performed through the victim back end system, they
will be runing with the same priviliges that the system have on the database, that means if the
system has a power user or administrator permisions then the injection code could be executed
with a disaster effects on the victim machine [2].
Section two presents the aspects related to the different types of SQLIAs and describes the
vulnerabilities that are used to perform the SQLIAs. Section three prsentes different previous
solutions to deal with the SQLIAs detection and prevention. Section four presents the suggested
hybrid technique. Section five presents a description of the simulation that has been developed to
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evaluate the reliability and accuracy of the suggested hybrid technique. Finally, section six
prsents the conclusion and future works.
2. SQL INJECTION ATTACKS
There is no solution that ensures all vulnerabilities in a system will be covered and controlled
completely 100%. There are vulnerabilities in which SQLIAs attackers preferred to use in order
to breach the systems data, those vulnerabilities are either Software or Hardware elements such as
(Servers, Web-Services, Operating Systems, Applications, Database Engines, etc.). If these
elements are not continuasly updated with the latest patches and security updates, then they will
be more vulnerable to be attacked, and then they might not be able to reject such attacks.
Monitoring, logging, validation, intrusion detection, and other operations are very useful in
system architectures to increase the security of the database. If the system is not applying a strong
input validation technique to check every database input to the system it will create a significant
problem, because the input parameters are the first gate to the attacker that could be used to inject
malicious code with this input [3].
The developers should be curious about the error reporting, they should not enable client error
reporting service, because it may lead to an important information of the code or the database of
the system.
The first mechanism to handle the security of a database is to ensure that their access is well
controlled, by assigning the access rights to the appropriate users or objects [8]. Hence, if the
first defense line is not handled as well as required then the database will be vulnerable to
different type of attacks.
It is important to secure the data especially the sensitive data, so even though the database is
secured from being hacked, sensitive data should be encrypted in the database or through the
network [13].
In advanced SQLIAs attackers prefer to use the database core tables that contain sensitive
information about the whole database system. Table 1 shows some of the common useful
database system tables that are preferred to be used in the SQLIAs.
Table 1. Database system’s tables for different Database environment
MS SQL Server MS Access Server Oracle
sysobjects syscolumns MSysACEs MsysObjects
MsysQueries
MSysRelationships
SYS.USER_OBJECTS SYS.TAB
SYS.USER_TABLES
SYS.USER_VIEWS
SYS.ALL_TABLES
SYS.USER_TAB_COLUMNS
SYS.USER_CONSTRAINTS
SYS.USER_TRIGGERS
SYS.USER_CATALOG
SQLIAs target database engines that are connected with data-driven systems. Hence, once users
are connected to database to get answers for their requests, the system submits these answers as
SQL queries to the database management system (DBMS) in the database server. After that, the
database server returns the related information (answers) to the system. Finally, the system
renders the resulted data as visual information to the requester (user).
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The attacker can exploit the flow of data between the user, the system, and the database to gain or
manipulate the data by sending queries loaded (injected) by malicious scripts, inline SQL queries,
or commands that will be executed by the database engine and applied to the system database [7].
The intents of the SQL injection attacks could be categorized as; Determining database
information, Data Gathering, Database Manipulation, Code Injection, Function Call Injection, or
Buffer Overflows. For more information on these SQL injection attacks please refere to [4].
The most effective gateways that are used to perform different types of SQLIAs are: browser
variables, user inputs, and injection HTTP header [4].
3. BACKGROUND
This section presents the litrature review that is relevant to SQLIAs and describes the common
researches and techniques that have been done in order to detect and prevent SQLIAs.
SQLIAs detection and prevention techniques have followed various aspects in order to come up
with an appropriate solution so as to prevent SQLIAs from being applied to different types of
databases. Some of these aspects are:
• Static Analysis: Static analysis is a principle that depends on finding the weaknesses and
malicious codes in the system source code prior to reaching the execution stage [10, 12].
Generally, this principle has been one of the most widely used to detect or prevent SQLIAs.
• Runtime Analysis: It is a technique which has been used to detect a specific type of attacks
that should be identefied in advance without the need of modifing the development lifecycle nor
the need of the source code of the system. Such a technique depends on tracking the events of
the system through its execution process and detects if there is any of attack that is happing while
execution [7] .
• Static and Runtime Analysis: In this type of analysis, different researches had choosen to
combine the two aforementioned techniques to create a more effective and reliable solution to
obtain a higher quality with a faster development and testing processes [1].
4. SUGGESTED HYBRID TECHNIQUE
This section focuses on the main idea of the suggested hybrid technique for detecting and
preventing SQLIAs.
4.1 Normal Data Exchanging Strategy
There are many architectures to manage and to organize any data-driven systems, but the most
common architecture that has been used is the three-tier architecture that depends on dividing the
system into three tiers [15] as follows:
1. Presentation Tier (a Web browser or rendering engine).
2. Logic Tier (a server code, such as C#, ASP, .NET, PHP, JSP, etc …).
3. Storage Tier (a database such as Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, Oracle, etc.).
Figure 1 summerizes the steps of exchanging data among the three-tier system architecture.
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Figure 1. Three-Tier Architecture Data Exchanging
Figure 2 describes the normal mode to link the logged on users to systems that have the database
instances and to determine the accessible instances.
Figure 2. Accessing Database in Normal Mode
4.2 Suggested Approach Strategy
The suggested approach is a runtime detection and prevention methodology that follows the same
steps as the normal approach to exchange the queries between the architecture parties
(Presentation-Logic-Storage), however, it provides an extra defense line on the Data-Tier to
ensure that this side will not execute any abnormal codes that incase affect the system partially or
completely or it affects the hosted operating system and devices.
This approach is based on providing security controlling methodology on the database server side
to ensures that all requested SQL queries from an inside or an outside the system are executed
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securely without any database fabrication or hacking. Figure 3 illustrates the process flow
diagram of the suggested approach stages from getting user or application access to the execution
of the queries that have been delivered to the database.
Figure 3. Process Flow Diagram for Suggested Approach
4.3 Suggested Approach Stages
The suggested approach is based on different stages to reject any malicious Question Assignment from being
passed through the database engine before its execution process, and those stages could be listed
as follows:
• Replicate system databases: For each database to be secured from SQLIAs, there should be a
new replication database and it should contain a small amount of sample data.
• Creating “database_Behaviors” database: The suggested approach should have a separate
database called “database_Behaviors” that contains all system database queries and their
expected behaviors that have resulted from SQL queries execution in normal cases. This database
is placed in the replicated instances.
• Redirect SQL queries: Any SQL Question Assignment assigned to be executed in the target database will be
initally delayed and replicated by the database engine then this replicated Question Assignment is sent to the
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virtual database (Schema Replicated database). Hence, the original SQL Question Assignment will be not
executed yet in this stage and it will be delayed to a later stage.
• Simple SQL syntax checking: All SQL queries that are passing through the replicated
database should also pass through multiple check processes before they move to the next step
namely, “The execution process”. The following list presents the checks processes that the SQL
queries should pass through:
– Encoding analysis: Before continuing to any next step the received SQL queries should be
analyzed to determine the character encoding that has been used to write these queries. There
are many techniques that can be used to do this analysis process such as “Automatic
Identification of Language and Encoding” [11].
– Simple White-Box validation: The Question Assignment should go through simple syntax validation and
filtering for specific SQL reserved words especially those that use (EXECUTE, SHELL
commands).
– Parameters replacement: Any parameter that has been found in the SQL Question Assignment should be
replaced by an indexing parameter names. Such as (@par_1, @par_2 … @par_n).
• Virtual execution: After the SQL syntax checking process, the SQL Question Assignment will be executed on
the replicated database “Virtual Database” in which it is a process that is running simultaneously
with the execution process, it monitors and traces the behaviors of the SQL Question Assignment.
• SQLIA Detection: This stage is the most important stage in the suggested technique, its
purpose is to detect whether the received SQL Question Assignment is valid and expected Question Assignment or not. The idea
here is to catch the objects that have been affected by the current SQL Question Assignment whatever the type of
such objects and create a list of these objects to use them in the next step of this stage.
The resulted list of affected objects will be compared with the “database_Behaviors”. If there is
a Question Assignment that handles all of the listed objects with the same type of behavior that is detected from
the previous step then this behavior Question Assignment will be added to a new list (Expected Queries). Any
resulted behavior that is detected as a suspicious should be rejected and deleted from the actual
database instance execution queue, otherwise the Question Assignment will be transferred to the actual database
instance for being executed.
5. Assessment AND DISCUSSION
As described before, the proposed hybrid technique combines static and runtime analysis
approaches to create a new solution to detect and prevent the SQLIAs. This suggested hybrid
technique will be installed and integrated with the database engines in the database server.
An application using VB .Net has been developed to simulate the work of the suggested
approach. The simulation application has been used to evaluate the performance and accuracy of
the detection and prevention processes in this approach. Using this application, two hundred and
fifty (250) SQL queries that cover all different types of SQLIA have been tested.
The results that had been obtained from simulating this hybrid technique of those 250 queries
prove that this hybrid technique could cover all known SQLIA gateways, and prevents any type
of SQLIAs.
Table 2 gives a comparison of well-known set of SQLIA detection and prevention techniques
along with our suggested hybrid technique in terms of their capability of detection and
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preventions, namely: Tautology, Built-In Functions, Logically Incorrect Queries, Union Question Assignment,
Stored Procedure, Piggy-Backed Queries, Inference, Alternate Encoding, and the Direct Attack.
Table 1: Various Schemes and SQL Injection Attacks
This table has been originally presented by [5] except for the first row of our suggested hybrid
technique, the third column of Built-In Functions, and the last column of direct attacks. From this
table, it can be concluded that our hybrid technique covers all types of SQLIA and it is the only
technique that prevents the direct attack type; that means it can detect and prevent any type of
SQLIA even if this attack is applied into the database directly. In other words, this hybrid
technique can detect and prevent SQLIAs that are performed through the system or through a
direct SQL Question Assignment to the database. Finally, the suggested hybrid technique is the only one that can
detect and prevent SQLIAs that are using Built-In functions to perform such attacks.
6. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
This paper has presented a novel hybrid technique that detects and prevents all types of SQLIAs
in different system categories regardless of the system development language or the database
engine.
The suggested hybrid technique is done in two main phases: runtime analysis, and static analysis.
The first phase is a dynamic/runtime analysis method that depends on applying tracking methods
to trace and monitor the execution processes of all received queries. The result of affected objects
of this monitoring will be compared with a prepared set of expected changes that the developer
had created before, and the result of this comparison process will decide if there is an existence of
any type of SQLIA and if so they will be forwarded to the next phase. The next phase is a static
analysis phase that is performing a string comparison between the received SQL queries and
previous expected SQL queries to prevent any Question Assignment that is described as a suspicious Question Assignment.
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Furthermore, the simulation showed that the suggested hybrid technique can detect and prevent
all types of SQLIAs.
The future plan is to enhance this technique by decreasing the time delay that the database
recovery takes after the SQLIA is detected.
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International Journal of Database Management Systems ( IJDMS ) Vol.6, No.1, February 2014 DOI : 10.5121/ijdms.2014.6102 21
DETECTION AND PREVENTION OF SQL INJECTION ATTACKS USING A HYBRID TECHNIQUE
Jalal Omer Atoum and Amer Jibril Qaralleh Princess Sumaya University for Technology, Amman, Jordan
ABSTRACT
SQL injection is a type of attacks used to gain, manipulate, or delete information in any data-driven system whether this system is online or offline and whether this system is a web or non-web-based. It is distinguished by the multiplicity of its performing methods, so defense techniques could not detect or prevent such attacks. The main objective of this paper is to create a reliable and accurate hybrid technique that secure systems from being exploited by SQL injection attacks. This hybrid technique combines static and runtime
