New Attack Exploits "Safe" Oracle Inputs

Trailrunner7 writes "Database security super-genius David Litchfield has found a way to manipulate common Oracle data types, which were not thought to be exploitable, and inject arbitrary SQL commands. The new method shows that you can no longer assume any data types are safe from attacker input, regardless of their location or function. 'In conclusion, even those functions and procedures that don't take user input can be exploited if SYSDATE is used. The lesson here is always, always validate and prevent this type of vulnerability getting into your code. The second lesson is that no longer should DATE or NUMBER data types be considered as safe and not useful as injection vectors: as this paper (PDF) has proved, they are,' Litchfield writes."

Comments

Re:To all you type safe ninnies

[AKAImBatman]

Type safety and "safe" data types are two different things. One is a language construct intended to prevent errors in code through compile-time checking (though you pay in flexibility), the other is types of data that theoretically can be used in a database without doing validation checks.

I'll leave it as an exercise for you to figure out which one is which.