Irony thou name is SQL injection

As I clicked on my slashdot bookmark, I for some reason said to my browser "Please give me something juicy" and it did not disappoint. It gave me this article. The sheer irony alone made me chuckle for 2-3 minutes. So, meine Damen und Herren, (I just had to throw a little German in there) let's talk about SQL injections. I promise this won't hurt (much)!


So, to understand a SQL injection, we need to understand SQL. To understand SQL, we need to know what a database is. And that's where we will start. This may be a bit round about, because to frank I find databases to be a dull and boring topic. We start at the bottom, with data elements. Now a data element is a single piece of data about an entity e.g. Name, Gender, Age, Favourite Star Wars Character and so on. A record is all the specific data elements about a specific entity e.g. {Saqib A Kakvi, Male, 23, Yoda} would be a record about me. If we have several such records stored as rows, we get a table. If we have more tables (generally related) we now have a database. In summary: A database is a collection of tables, which in turn is a collection of records, which in turn are a set of data elements.

Agreed, it's all fine and dandy having all this data nicely stored, but how do we access specific parts of it? The answer is Structured Query Language or SQL (sometimes pronounced 'sequel') for short. SQL is basically a language that allows us to get a section of a database based on some criteria e.g. all the records of people who are over the age of 30. Although SQL gives you quite a lot of lean room, it is strongly typed, which means that all SQL statements must have a very specific form, syntax and all the right symbols in all the right places.


And this brings us to SQL injection. A SQL injection exploits the srong-typing of SQL and issues malformed statements which cause the SQL interpreter to go a little bit bonkers and produce some crazy result. By taking very, for lack of a better phrase, well-formed malformed queries, an attacker can recover parts of (and even all of) the database. When implementing a database, one must ensure that any and all malformed queries are rejected, thus making SQL injections irrelevant. 


MySQL is a software that helps you implement, run and maintain a database (known as a Relation DataBase Management System {RDBMS}). The MySQL company seems to have forgotten about this vulnerability in a primary part of their system. As we have seen, MySQL (and apparently sun.com) have been so ironically compromised due to a SQL vulnerability. Well who would have thought it?


ME! ME! ME! Well, actually the thought had crossed my mind a few times and I thought it was funny, but sincerely hoped that it would never happen. Well done world, you continue to surprise me.