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Database Security

Nowadays, databases are cardinal components of any web based application by enabling websites to provide varying dynamic content. Since very sensitive or secret informations can be stored in such database, you should strongly consider to protect them somehow.

To retrieve or to store any information you need to connect to the database, send a legitimate query, fetch the result, and close the connecion. Nowadays, the commonly used interface in the interaction with databases is the Structured Query Language (SQL). See how an attacker can tamper with an SQL query.

As you can realize, PHP cannot protect your database by itself. The following sections aim to be an introduction into the very basics of how to access and manipulate databases within PHP scripts.

Keep in my mind this simple rule: defence in depth. In the more place you take the more action to increase the protection of your database, the less probability of that an attacker succeeds, and exposes or abuse any stored secret information. Good design of the database schema and the application deals with your greatest fears.

Designing Databases

The first step is always to create the database, unless you want to use an existing third party's one. When a database is created, it is assigned to an owner, who executed the creation statement. Usually, only the owner (or a superuser) can do anything with the objects in that database, and in order to allow other users to use it, privileges must be granted.

Applications should never connect to the database as its owner or a superuser, because these users can execute any query at will, for example, modifying the schema (e.g. dropping tables) or deleting its entire content.

You may create different database users for every aspect of your application with very limited rights to database objects. The most required privileges should be granted only, and avoid that the same user can interact with the database in different use cases. This means that if intruders gain access to your database using one of these credentials, they can only effect as many changes as your application can.

You are encouraged not to implement all the business logic in the web application (i.e. your script), instead to do it in the database schema using views, triggers or rules. If the system evolves, new ports will be intended to open to the database, and you have to reimplement the logic in each separate database client. Over and above, triggers can be used to transparently and automatically handle fields, which often provides insight when debugging problems with your application or tracing back transactions.

Connecting to Database

You may want to estabilish the connections over SSL to encrypt client/server communications for increased security, or you can use ssh to encrypt the network connection between clients and the database server. If either of them is done, then monitoring your traffic and gaining informations in this way will be a hard work.

Encrypted Storage Model

SSL/SSH protects data traveling from the client to the server, SSL/SSH does not protect the persistent data stored in a database. SSL is an on-the-wire protocol.

Once an attacker gains access to your database directly (bypassing the webserver), the stored sensitive data may be exposed or misused unless, the information is protected by the database itself. Encrypting the data is a good way to mitigate this threat, but very few databases offer this type of data encryption.

The easiest way to work around this problem is to first create your own encryption package, and then use it from within your PHP scripts. PHP can assist you in this case with its several extensions, such as Mcrypt and Mhash, covering a wide variety of encryption algorithms. The script encrypts the data be stored first, and decrypts it when retrieving. See the references for further examples how encryption works.

In case of truly hidden data, if its raw representation is not needed (i.e. not be displayed), hashing may be also taken into consideration. The well-known example for the hashing is storing the MD5 hash of a password in a database, instead of the password itself. See also crypt() and md5().

// storing password hash
$query  = sprintf("INSERT INTO users(name,pwd) VALUES('%s','%s');",
            addslashes($username), md5($password));
$result = pg_exec($connection, $query);

// querying if user submitted the right password
$query = sprintf("SELECT 1 FROM users WHERE name='%s' AND pwd='%s';",
            addslashes($username), md5($password));
$result = pg_exec($connection, $query);

if (pg_numrows($result) > 0) {
    echo "Wellcome, $username!";
}
else {
    echo "Authentication failed for $username.";
}

SQL Injection

Many web developers are unaware of how SQL queries can be tampered with, and assume that an SQL query is a trusted command. It means that SQL queries are able to circumvent access controls, thereby bypassing standard authentication and authorization checks, and sometimes SQL queries even may allow access to host operating system level commands.

Direct SQL Command Injection is a technique where an attacker creates or alters existing SQL commands to expose hidden data, or to override valuable ones, or even to execute dangerous system level commands on the database host.

This is accomplished by the application taking user input and combining it with static parameters to build a SQL query. The following examples are based on true stories, unfortunately.

Owing to the lack of input validation and connecting to the database on behalf of a superuser or the owner who can create users, the attacker may create a superuser in your database.

$offset = argv[0]; // beware, no input validation!
$query  = "SELECT id, name FROM products ORDER BY name LIMIT 20 OFFSET $offset;";
$result = pg_exec($conn, $query);

0;
insert into pg_shadow(usename,usesysid,usesuper,usecatupd,passwd)
    values ('crack', 31, 't','t','crack');
--

0;
insert into pg_shadow(usename,usesysid,usesuper,usecatupd,passwd)
    select 'crack', usesysid, 't','t','crack'
    from pg_shadow where usename='postgres';
--

0;
UPDATE user SET Password=PASSWORD('crack') WHERE user='root';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

$query  = "SELECT id, name, inserted, size FROM products WHERE size = '$size';";

union select '1', concat(uname||'-'||passwd) as name, '1971-01-01', '0' from usertable

$query = "UPDATE usertable SET pwd='$pwd' WHERE uid='$uid';";

$query = "UPDATE usertable SET pwd='...' WHERE uid='' or like '%admin%'; --";

$query = "UPDATE usertable SET pwd='hehehe', admin='yes', trusted=100 WHERE ...;"

$query  = "SELECT * FROM products WHERE id LIKE '%$prod%'";
$result = mssql_query($query);

$query  = "SELECT * FROM products WHERE id LIKE '%a%' exec master..xp_cmdshell 'net user test testpass /ADD'--";
$result = mssql_query($query);

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