Ericka Chickowski posted an interview with the creators of the open source library AntiSQLi at Dark Reading. She is discussing a very interesting development tool, but the value proposition gets somewhat lost in the creators’ poor terminology.

First some background: there is no such thing as an ‘unparameterized’ database query. Every SQL query has at least 2 parameters: The contents of the SELECT and WHERE clauses. Without parameters in those two clauses the query fails in the parser and generates an error. No parameters, no query.

So SQLi is not really a problem of ‘unparameterized’ queries – it is a problem of unvalidated input values to parameters. SQLi is where we shove bad data into parameters – not a lack of parameters!

The AntiSQLi library is simple and clever: it works like an app-side stored procedure. And like a stored procedure it forces datas type on its input values. It essentially handles the casting operation to force type and length. AntiSQLi weeds out variables that don’t match the prescribed data type, and extra long variables in some cases. Obviously it cannot catch everything but it does filter out many common and crude SQLi attacks.

A better term would have been “un-cast query parameters”. Regardless of the terminology, though, I am happy to see innovation in this area. For years I have been recommending that developers build this functionality into their own reusable security libraries, but AntiSQLi is a quick and easy way to get started, and a nice tool to have in your toolbox.

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