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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 40.2 ms ] thread1. 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...
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).
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
Would you mind to give some examples?
do you write custom rules based on your actual application? <- not a real question
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...
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.
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?