What is an SQL Injection Attack / Vulnerability?

A SQL injection vulnerability can occur when a poorly-written program uses user-provided data in a database query without first validating the input. This is most-often found within webpages with dynamic content. There are some excellent tutorials and descriptive articles on this subject, as well as many vulnerability postings for different applications from full-disclosure websites.

A simple example of SQL injection is a basic HTML form login in which you provide a username and password:

Given this snippet of HTML, one can deduce that the easiest (and worst) way for the script "process_login.php" to work would be for it to build and execute a database query that looks like this:


"SELECT id
FROM logins
WHERE username = '$username'
and password = '$password'";



Under those circumstances, if the variables "$username" and "$password" are taken directly from the user's input, the login script can easily be tricked into believing that a valid password has been provided by playing with the syntax of the SQL statement. Suppose the following string were provided as the password:

' or '' = '



and we gave "bob" as the username. Once the variables are interpolated, the query above would look like this:


"SELECT id
FROM logins
WHERE username = 'bob'
and password = '' or '' = ''";


This query will return a row because the final clause:


... or '' = ''


will always evaluate to true (an empty string is always equal to an empty string).