research at Positive Technologies • Member of Positive Hack Days (https://phdays.com) conference board • Occasional web security blogger (https://raz0r.name) • Denis Kolegov • Team lead of Application Firewall research at Positive Technologies • PhD, associate professor at Tomsk State University • Web security micro blogger (https://twitter.com/dnkolegov)
is joint work of PT Application Firewall Research Team developing a database firewall prototype as a part of our application firewall • Thanks to Arseny Reutov Denis Kolegov Vladimir Kochetkov Igor Kanygin Nikolay Tkachenko Ivan Hudyashov Sergey Grechnev Sergey Reshetnikov
application firewalls which • Monitor database activity • Detect database specific attacks • Protect sensitive information stored in the databases • Implement adequate access control models
actions on each query: • Pass • Log for monitoring purposes • Alert • Rewrite query • Block (either by dropping connection or by generating a native error code)
mod_security of DBFWs for many years, but open source project is no longer maintained • SQL Injection detection is based on risk score using metrics: SQL comments Sensitive tables OR token UNION token Variable comparison Always true expressions and more
accurate than antiSQLi and GreenSQL and significantly faster than antiSQLi in classifying legitimate SQL statements and SQLi attacks.” • However, it takes lots of computing power to train the model since tree operations are time expensive • The algorithm is not tolerant to attacks during training
in all database firewalls • It works like linting utilities or linters (e.g. eslint, pylint, cppint, etc.), but analyses SQL queries and check if they satisfy security policy (SQL profile) • The main goal is to prevent using of SQLi automatic tools and exploits • SQL profile can be Static: created by manual configuration Dynamic: created by source code analysis tools
to preventing SQL Injection, proposed by Hansen and Patterson in 2005 Given a set of known-good queries and the base formal grammar, Dejector builds a new subgrammar that contains only the rules required to produce exactly the queries in the known-good set Strings recognized by the subgrammar are guaranteed to be structurally identical to those in the known-good set The subgrammar is then used with a parser generator such as bison or ANTLR to produce a recognizer for the sublanguage
/ 0.0019 sec ~ 0.67 / 0.002 sec ~ 0.33 / 0.003 sec ~ 0.32 / 0.009 sec Python 2.7 SubMySQL ~ 0.09 / 0.0011 sec ~ 0.102 / 0.0011 sec ~ 0.09 / 0.001 sec ~ 0.18 / 0.005 sec Test SELECT * FROM a WHERE b='c' SELECT * FROM a WHERE b BETWEEN 'c' AND 'd' INSERT INTO passbook VALUES('a','b','c','d','e','f','g','h') CREATE TABLE a (b int(5) AUTO_INCREMENT, c date, d VARCHAR(255), e VARCHAR(255), f VARCHAR(255), g int(10), h int(10), i float(10,2), j VARCHAR(255), PRIMARY KEY (b)) ~ 1.54 / 0.003 sec ~ 0.09 / 0.001 sec SELECT * FROM (((((((SELECT col1 FROM t1) AS ttt))))))* * Query can not be derived in SubMySQL grammar
DBFW it can look up those session identifiers in the database shared with WAF • WAF holding access control policy for web users acts as information point, i.e. it provides user information given a session cookie • DBFW serves as enforcement point, effectively blocking or allowing queries
have a chance to deploy a host module (agent)? • We can still try to correlate HTTP and SQL using time-throttled request processing • Idea is that we process HTTP requests synchronously, observe emitted SQL queries, and associate them with HTTP requests
parameter value found in SQL query with a constant • Then it tries to parse and get tokens firstly for the original query and then for the second one with replaced constants • If a number of tokens is different, an SQL Injection is reported since constant replacement have caused changes in the query structure
false negatives too? One of bypasses for owasp-modsecurity-crs found by Ivan Novikov It is not detected by libinjection too due to the context issue From Theory to Practice curl 'localhost/index.html?id=1%20or%20true' 1%20or%20true id=1.or-id id=.1or-UTC_DATE— )-sleep(9999 sleep(9999) */UNION SELECT password FROM users--
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch Accept-Language: ru-RU,ru;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4 /*{"get_args":[{"id":"1 or true"}]}*/ select * from users where clientid = 1 or true select * from users where clientid = "" select * from users where clientid = 1 or true
"" select * from users where id = 1 or true select * from users where clientid = "" Lexems select * from users where clientid = 1 or true Lexems 8 ≠ 10
access control mechanisms • The main statement of any access policy: All entities must be identified • Entities identification in account-based systems: at least it is necessary to identify web application subjects (users) that initiate queries to DBMS • Approaches Many-to-many applications HTTP and SQL user tracking RASP • Angine - ABAC eNgine
parser • Release MySQL grammar for ANTLR4 • PT Application Firewall integration • SQL user tracking • Machine learning for sensitive data discovery • Inspected Application Module for DBFW
analyzers? Peculiarities Web-only IAM can not process non HTTP attack vectors There are some cases when CompFG is not adequate to detect attacks • Loops, recursion • Internal and external dependencies The idea is to build SQL profile based on application code, compile it to binary module and run on the DBFW This approach can be used to detect second order SQL injection attacks
where id= intval(".$_POST["id"]) $result = mysql_query($sql, $connection) $row = mysql_fetch_row($result) $sql = "select * from data where fname=' ".$row[2]. " ' " Untrusted data read from database. What if fname is ' or '1' = '1 ? Second order SQL injection
where id= intval(".$_POST["id"]) $result = mysql_query($sql, $connection) $row = mysql_fetch_row($result) $sql = "select * from data where fname=' ".$row[2]. " ' " The main SQL injection feature: a number of tokens more that one
where id= intval(".$_POST["id"]) $result = mysql_query($sql, $connection) $row = mysql_fetch_row($result) $sql = "select * from data where fname=' ".$row[2]. " ' " (concat "select * from data where fname=" ( concat (index-access row 2) "'"))
where id= intval(".$_POST["id"]) $result = mysql_query($sql, $connection) $row = mysql_fetch_row($result) $sql = "select * from data where fname=' ".$row[2]. " ' " (concat "select * from data where fname=" ( concat (index-access row 2) "'")) (call mysql_fetch_row (call mysql_query (concat "select * from data where id=intval(" (concat (index- access POST, "id") ")")) connection))
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, sdch Accept-Language: ru-RU,ru;q=0.8,en-US;q=0.6,en;q=0.4 select * from data where id=1000 select * from data where fname='john' or '1'='1' 1 ≠ 2