Preventing SQL Injections When WAF’s Not Enough | Hacker News Reader

Preventing SQL Injections When WAF’s Not Enough

cossacklabs.com

18 pointsninegunpi13 comments

Umh, this article is dubious.

1. If your WAF can be fooled by adding a X-Forwarded-For header, trouble ahead.

2. If your security strategy is about mitigating attacks where the payload matches some regular expressions, trouble ahead. Machine learning? Double trouble ahead.

3. If you don't write only completely static queries[1] to then use as prepared statements or use a proper ORM[2] when using a SQL database, trouble ahead.

[1] https://www.akadia.com/services/dyn_modify_where_clause.html

[2] Like linq, jOOQ...

If your security strategy relies on one or two security controls, you're doomed most of the time.

We've added SQL filtering as a defense-in-depth measure, having a convenient seat in the architecture, complementing every other mitigation measure proper application developers and DBAs should be doing (and frequently get wrong).

Even ORMs get bypassed once in a while:

- https://github.com/mysqljs/mysql/issues/342 - https://github.com/sequelize/sequelize/issues/5671 - (okay, we can avoid this one by saying nothing "nothing proper exists in NodeJS world) https://bertwagner.com/2018/03/06/2-5-ways-your-orm-will-all...

Dumb concatenation can nullify the merit of quite advanced ORM: copybook example of misusing Ruby's ActiveRecord (is that proper enough) got as far as OWASP testing guide: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Testing_for_ORM_Injection_(O...

Prepared statements are cooked wrong as well, but rarely, that's why they are viable line of defense, but not the sole one (as nothing should be):

https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/ww9qm/sqli_bypassin... https://stackoverflow.com/questions/134099/are-pdo-prepared-...

(in fact, I've seen with my eyes exactly what first comment in reddit postmentions).

WAF's are never good enough. They're a weak band-aid used by companies who lack the expertise to find and fix security bugs in their own code.

This is the correct answer. Unfortunately PCI dictates that you can use WAFs instead of real coding standards and testing.

For anyone curious why WAFs are so useless, there is a very beginner-accessible talk by Joe McCray here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBVThFwdYTc

The company I work at has many PCI compliant systems. I asked a security officer why they were still doing certain things the old way. He explained they very well know it’s the old way but in order to be compliant they must do it.

It's not about old vs new, it's about strong vs weak. WAF was too weak to be your primary line of defense against SQL injection when it was first popularized and it's still too weak now.

I'm curious by what do you mean 'old way' for the very reason exposed above.

Would you mind to give some examples?

do you have mod_security and the standard rules? Yes

do you write custom rules based on your actual application? <- not a real question

A simple example would be changing passwords every 90 days. It’s been proven users will choose less secure passwords.

Here is an article from the FTC and one about NIST guidelines.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/blogs/techftc/2016/03/time-r...

https://qz.com/981941/the-us-standards-office-wants-to-do-aw...

Where I work Compliance and Security are completely different departments. This is great because the Security department does whatever they think is best for security, regardless of compliance requirements.

The Compliance department has one job: passing audits. They never tell Security what to do; they document "compensating controls" and if that's not good enough for an Auditor the Compliance department will run whatever worthless compliance control themselves.

I'm not saying security compliance itself is a joke. It forces small businesses to at least try to get their shit together. But for big tech companies with real security programs, security compliance is a worthless tax.

This is an advertisement.

That's why we now have RASP. It's better than SQL proxy and WAF, because you have both the SQL query and the HTTP parameters and you can correlate them to be super accurate

Isn't RASP just slapping the WAF-like signature detection into your application data streams directly? How would RASP prevent:

1. Insiders having access to database front?

2. Same SQL bypass techniques as employed to bypass WAFs?

3. Mitigate developer errors in query logic which enable custom injections?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com