GreenSQL is a Database Security Solution, says CTO David Maman (Video)

'GreenSQL is an Open Source database firewall used to protect databases from SQL injection attacks,' says the GreenSQL.net website, which also says, 'GreenSQL works as a proxy and has built-in support for MySQL and PostgreSQL. The logic is based on evaluation of SQL commands using a risk scoring matrix as well as blocking known db administrative commands (DROP, CREATE, etc).' The company also maintains a commercial version as a separate entity. GreenSQL CTO/CoFounder David Maman gives more details about both the company and open source GreenSQL in this video interview.

Comments

Please forgive my likely stupidity

[Anrego]

Don’t worry I don’t do much work with databases any more (nor web apps)... but isn’t the whole SQL injection problem pretty much solved by using prepared statements to decouple data from the query?

I get that prepared statements arn’t a panacea for all vulnerabilities, but I always thought it pretty much did defeated the SQL injection stuff. Are there some this doesn’t eliminate, or is this just one of “those” products (“dear CEO, protect yourself from losing millions like these companies did by installing a DATABASE FIREWALL today”)?

Re:Please forgive my likely stupidity

[ioErr]

Hire competent programmers or hire cheap programmers and install a database firewall instead. Some companies are going to opt for the cheap programmers.

Other than that, I guess you could use the database firewall if you have an old legacy system of questionable quality.

Re:Please forgive my likely stupidity

[Anonymous Coward]

I still work with databases, and yes, this seems like a pretty horrible solution to a not that difficult problem. A "risk scoring matrix" sounds a lot like something that is going to by definition have false positives, which would be a nightmare when trying to debug an app. Not to mention that this thing is going to be another point of failure in general.

To use the obligatory car analogy, I'd say this thing is kind of like wiring a bomb to a fingerprint reader that will go off if someone other than you tries to start your car. Yes, that will probably stop a car thief, but it opens the possibility for some less than ideal side effects, and a better and cheaper solution would probably be to just lock your doors.

Re:Please forgive my likely stupidity

[biodata]

Tell that to the clueless companies that got hacked by LulzSec using SQL injection. There are plenty of companies out there who want a website but don't want the headache of employing people who know how to build one. They can't be bothered to patch their servers, and they think a good 'web designer' is someone with some kind of qualification in graphic design. Once they have an insecure half-baked 'solution', that looks nice, they like to think they can buy in database firewall software to really harden their 'platform' against 'threats'. They don't understand that a website is a machine, and machines should be designed by engineers to stop them breaking all the time. I can see a huge market for this stuff.

Re:Please forgive my likely stupidity

[nahdude812]

SQL injections are impossible if all user input is necessarily relegated to a bound parameter. Unfortunately like pretty much every modern major vulnerability, having a correct way to address the problem doesn't necessarily mean you'll never see it. Saying, "That would never happen to us because we only hire good developers," is not a good affirmative defense.

You can work very, very hard to make sure these sort of common vulnerabilities don't exist in your systems, but you can't guarantee that they never will, even if you control the entire software stack (which many places do not). So in the spirit of defense in depth, it pays to use all the same anti-SQL-injection stuff you're already using, then go ahead and protect yourself in case your other measures have failed.

Unfortunately, however, I dislike the idea that a newly deployed feature might be flagged as suspicious by an intermediary and disabled. This seems like it would create some very hard to diagnose problems - particularly if it rejects some statements from a transaction and not others. Now you may end up in an inconsistent state, and so your security tool might be what actually breaks you.

Re:Please forgive my likely stupidity

[vlm]

Hire competent programmers or hire cheap programmers and install a database firewall instead. Some companies are going to opt for the cheap programmers.

If its a closed source app, even trying to figure out if they used prepared statements probably violates your license and/or a variety of local laws.

Its like the IP firewall argument, you don't need one if your server writers are not idiots, but if its closed source you have no way to figure out if they're idiots, so...

Re:Please forgive my likely stupidity

[Charliemopps]

Over the past year or so I've worked myself into being the technical lead on a bunch of projects, and being an open-source kind of guy in a company that's heavily reliant on many closed source solutions that have not treated us very well in the past I've been pushing for our new contracts, when we're hiring someone to write something for us, to stipulate that the vendor is write code for us, and we get the code... and compile it ourselves. We've had a number of projects where some company wrote us software, and very commonly then jacked up their prices once we were dependent on their software and wanted to modify it. Less commonly, but much worse, sometimes when we'd go back to the vendor for modifications they'd be out of business and we'd basically have to scrap the entire system to make a change. Which we of course wouldn't want to do... so then we'd be stuck using something written all wrong for the processes we're implementing now. Oh how I miss the days when management didn't change business practices every 3 months.

Re:Please forgive my likely stupidity

[Alex Belits]

No.

You can't possibly generate an exploit-triggering SQL statement unless you either have exploit-triggering expression hardcoded in your code (and then your software is sabotaged already, and any discussion of its security is moot) or applications converts input into constants that are used to generate SQL statements (what the practice you are trying to besmirch, explicitly disallows).

You lack basic understanding of application security, and should never talk about any such subjects ever again.

Re:Please forgive my likely stupidity

[Bert64]

Prepared statements work well and are easy to implement.
Input validation on the other hand is extremely time consuming and error prone to implement, and extremely difficult to get right in all but the simplest of cases.

If you take a blacklist approach, then you open yourself up to unexpected attacks and have to keep adding things to the blacklist.
If you take a whitelist approach, then you will get cases where things break... For instance phone numbers, only allow numerics? what about when someone formats their phone number as xxx-xxx or (xxx) xxxxxx, or +xx xxxx etc... Or names, what about people with names like O'Callaghan or hyphenated names, or names in non latin character sets...

And then for any moderately complex application, you need different input validation rules for different fields, resulting in extreme complexity and plenty of scope for bugs...

At least if you use prepared statements, users won't be able to interrupt the execution flow, and although they might be able to put bogus entries into the database, good output encoding will prevent things like cross site scripting attacks rendering them at best a minor irritation...

Don't miss this important message!

[Anonymous Coward]

'GreenSQL is advertising on Slashdot,' says the GreenSQL.net website, which also says, 'GreenSQL does some stuff and has built-in support for other software. The logic is based on evaluation of input using a buzzword as well as blocking known bad things (death, procreation, etc).' The company also maintains a commercial version as a separate entity. GreenSQL CTO/CoFounder David Maman gives more details about both the company and open source GreenSQL in this video advert.

Re:Don't miss this important message!

[Anonymous Coward]

/. has come to this .. where AC comments get modded as "Insightful" - because the actually are.

Damn right they are. I'm insightful as shit. I'm also funny as hell, informative as fuck, and interesting as goatse.

I like it and I hate it

[erroneus]

I hate it for obvious reasons. The fact is, avoiding SQL vulnerabilities is FRIKKEN TRIVIAL and every coder who calls himself professional who enables such vulnerabilities needs to stop calling himself professional. This is a "problem" that shouldn't be fixed from the outside but from the inside.

That said, it's rather like all other things human. You can blame the people for acting like people all day long, but it won't change the fact that they are still people. What's more, if you're not a coder or simply don't have the time and resources to correct the problem or (* worse *) you're using one of those protected PHP programs which can't be fixed except by the guy with the decryption key and/or original source, this may well be the better way to correct and compensate for such problems.

I like that it exists for situations where it's simply needed to protect the business and workflow. I dislike that it's needed at all.

Downsides

[biodata]

Apart from the increased consumption of CPU cycles, RAM, file handles etc on the server, the increased latency of DB queries slowing down page returns, the increased testing and debugging load pointed out by others, the false sense of security and the increased cost of infrastructure, the main downside might just be that this could become an interesting new attack vector - how scaleable is this thing? Can it be easily overwhelmed, since it is acting as a bottleneck between database and site? Is it vulnerable to slow loris style attacks? Can it be used for privilege escalation? Until it has survived its first few exploits in the wild we won't really know.

Transcript

[QuasiSteve]

I don't watch videos. Transcript?

Incoming!

-----

Title: David Maman, Co-Founder and CTO of GreenSQL, Talks About Database Security
Description: GreenSQL creates and maintains both proprietary and open source database security software

[00:00] <TITLE>
"GreenSQL is a Database Security Solution..." appears above the SlashdotTV logo bar with "David Maman - Co-Founder & CTO, GreenSQL" in the bottom of the view of a still shot from the interview, showing David Maman over a dark background.

[00:02] David>
My name is David Maman, I'm CTO and founded of GreenSQL.
GreenSQL is a company which provides a solution for database security as well as performance and compliance, eventually.
GreenSQL started as an Open Source project, actually.
In 2006, me and a friend started a very, very nice and easy-going Open Source project, and the Open Source project up 'til today is the only solution available for MySQL database - to secure it.
When I'm saying "securing it", it's not just about hardening password, but it's truly identifying threads in queries running to the database, and detecting it.
Even though it was a very simple solution that we have invested only a few hours in, each one of us, in our free time, the first 3 years we had more than 100,000 downloads of the Open Source project.
The Open Source project was so common that we started receiving a lot of feature requests and a lot of support requests for actually huge organizations - that we were surprised as well.
As time passed we've seen that there is an unmet need in the market; not only that enterprise companies - and I'm talking about high-end telecom and enterprise companies got great solution that they can buy, like Imperva acquired by IBM, and like Secerno which Oracle have purchased 2 years ago, and so on, and so on - but medium and even large organization that can not afford $200k for a basic solution, don't have any solution in the market.
We raised capital, and we started a company and we developed from scratch a new solution, and we call it unified database security.
It's a software-based solution that provides you database security, database auditing, database performance and database masking in one extremely easy to manage, to install, and to troubleshoot software-based solution.
We started sales less than a year ago, and we are going high and up 'til today we got more than 2,000 downloads per month.
The solution is very easy to use, so because we have started from Open Source - and even though it's a completely different solution, that's got nothing to do with the Open Source - we are maintaining the Open Source, but not in a high level.
Even though it's a very easy and simple to use solution, we have decided to also give a free version, so you get the security for free.
You can pay only for additional features like auditing, like masking, like performance and so on, and so on.
So we get more than 2,000 new installations per month at customer premises, and we support, currently, MySQL, Microsoft SQL, PostgreS, and very soon Oracle as well.

[02:54] David>
As a developer, you never take into consideration the entire life cycle of your information, the information itself that is eventually stored inside databases - and it doesn't matter which type of application you develop, and which platform you use, eventually the information is stored inside a database.
Even though you can clear it as "it's okay, and my database is secured", but when unauthorized access is being accessed to your database, unauthorized users, unauthorized application, all the big noise surrounding SQL injection attacks for example, how you can defend from SQL injections.
So naturally, the good developers will say that "I don't need that! I know how to write a secure code!" - and I'm sure most of the people do know how to write secure code.
The problem is that you use a lot of legacy applications and a lot of legacy code, that you

Performance concerns...

[Shoten]

So, I went to the site (be patient; it'll respond eventually) and looked at the section called "GreenSQL Performance Test." I found some fairly interesting benchmarks, which looked good...until I looked at the details. For one thing, they disabled logging...yes, on a security component, they set loglevel to 0. They also disabled the "risk calculation" capability, which is one of their selling (sourcing?) points. I have to wonder what the performance would be like with loglevel set a bit higher, so that you would actually get notice of any failed SQL-based attacks; if the SQL calls are homogenous enough, you can get by without the risk calculation feature by doing a proper ruleset. But no logging? Oy...I can't imagine that would fly in most places where they would be implementing this kind of technology. It certainly fails PCI compliance, that's for sure.