Combining SQL Query Strings and CFQUERYPARAM
If you have been following the muse the last few days you will know that I've had my shoulder to the wheel helping customers and fellow developers sort through making changes to their site to protect against a particularly malicious SQL Injection attack (read about the details here). Some of the folks who have contacted me are dealing with extra problems because their code uses string concatenation to build dynamic SQL strings. So the question has been asked a few times, "How do I go about building an SQL string with CFQUERYPARAMs in it?" Unfortunately, if you have chosen this approach it's going to be difficult to help you without seriously refactoring your code. Here's a few tips that can help, and one approach that might get you most of the way there.
Read MoreSQL Injection Part II (Make Sure You Are Sitting Down)
Back in February I wrote a blog post on SQL Injection that included an example of how a malicious user might inject into a character field even though ColdFusion escapes single quote marks. The attack involved other forms of escaping single quotes - and was effective against MySQL. This week I stumbled upon (more like a train wreck) an attack that is much more sophisticated - and also involves injection into a character field. I am told that others have discovered and written on this attack over the last few weeks - but I was unaware of it until a customer of ours was victimized. Amazingly, the specific real world attack I discovered and fixed allowed the hacker to append a string to every char column in every table of the database. It was so pervasive it left me wondering if it was SQL injection at all - until I found a URL entry that looked something like this:
Read MoreWebmaniacs - Cryptography and Dentistry
On Tuesday I took in a workshop on Cryptography by Dean Saxe. Dean is an impressive character with a head stuffed full of knowledge and spilling out everywhere. He obviously knew what he was talking about. As a topic, cryptography is so impossibly complicated and intricate that he could not do it justice in a 50 minute session. Most discussions about cryptography center around keys, algorithms and best practices - and this was no exception. Dean recommended against relying on CF's own encrypt and decrypt functions for anything but the most rudimentary encryption. In fact, he probably didn't even go that far. That tidbit of advice is common from almost every security pro I have ever heard mention the subject. When it came to discussing keys it was like a trip to the dentist.
Read MoreDisabling Backslash Escaping in MySQL
For muse readers who read my previous post on SQL injection examples that use character rather than numeric fields, I offer this tip I picked up on CF-Talk from Azadi Saryev. It appears you can disable the ability to escape special characters using the backslash. Here is the exact note from Azadi.
Read More
SQL Injection Using a Character Field
Ok, I admit it. Most of the examples of SQL injection that I give use a numeric field. Why? Because to inject using a character field requires manipulating single quotes. Since Coldfusion escapes single quotes automatically when using the cfquery tag these attacks are much more difficult to pull off. It may surprise you to know that your character fields can still be vulnerable and it is my belief that you should still use CFQueryparam. In fact, one of the attacks below can work even if you do use cfqueryparam. Check it out.
Read MoreDoes CFArgument Typing Protect Against SQL Injection
This question was asked on one of the several lists to which I subscribe. The author wanted to know if he needed to do anything else as long as he was specifying the "type" attribute of the Cfargument tag - or was that sufficient protection against the dreaded SQL Injection Attack (see my previous post on Application Security). Like the Elves of the Shire my answer is both yea and nay. Consider this example:
Read MoreWeb Logs and Security - Do You Know What's in Your Log Files?
So you have a new ecommerce application eh? You say you've done your homework. You are using a reputable gateway. You think you are PCI compliant. You are not storing Credit card numbers anywhere and you are using SSL (plus you have new snazzy haircut). Life is good. Hmmmm.... do you ever stay awake at night wondering if you forgot something? One of the things that you might have overlooked is the web log files. I'm sure you are aware of these files... the ones that your customer is always running reports on so he can marvel at the ip geocoding and exclaim "Well would you look at that" about the 4 people from Uzbekistan that visited the site yesterday. Web logs come in a number of flavors, but most of them are able to track the URL "query_string" variable in the log. Many of them are set up this way by default. This can be helpful to figure out traffic patterns. If you handle credit cards a certain way however, they can lead to the pit of despair. Take this example....
Read MoreHandling Credit Card Data and PCI Compliance
Muse Reader Asks:
"I thought I would ask your opinion on how to use CF as a front-end to SQL database with CC information and still be compliment with PCI standard 10.2 and 10.3. We are going to have an appliance to capture and store the information needed by the auditors. But I can't have everything showing up as the CF service."
I asked my good friend Brian Harvey from Studio Cart to answer this question. He has been a good resource for us on the pitfalls of working with Credit Card data and PCI compliance. His response is quite informative.
Read MoreSites to Watch
Aggregators
RSS
