Approaches for detecting and preventing the SQL injection attacks Essay

There are several approaches introduced for detecting and preventing the SQL injection attacks. Some of them are discussed below
Preventive Coding Practices
The main reason of SQL injection attacks is deficient input validation. Application of preventive coding practices is the solution for avoiding these vulnerabilities. Some of the methods are illustrated
Verification Input Type
The SQL injection attacks can be implemented by injecting statements into parameters of numeric or string type. Single verification of these inputs can avoid many attacks. For example, the developer can implement logic to reject the input if it contains characters other than numbers/digits for numeric inputs. This logic is missed by many programmers as most of the time user input is given in the form of string.
Input Encoding
Injection of vulnerabilities is always achieved with the use of Meta characters that deceive the parser in SQL to enact input given by the user as tokens. Though it is feasible to avoid Meta characters usage, by doing so it would curb a normal users capability to indicate legitimate input that contain such characters. Usage of functions that conceal string in a way that all Meta characters are encoded and enacted as general characters by the database is a better solution for this.
Pattern matching
The programmers should include proper validations of the input which recognizes between normal and bad input. This positive validation searches and identifies the input for banned patterns or SQL tokens. The developers cannot always identify every type of attack that could be performed on the application in future, but they should be able to mention all forms of valid input, positive validation to verify the inputs in safer way.
Recognizing input sources
All the input for the application has to be verified by the developers as there are various possible sources of input. These input sources can aid the attackers to introduce SQL injection attacks if they are used to construct query. Hence all input sources need to be checked.
Defensive practices are always prone to errors by human and are not always applied as best practice to avoid SQLIA. Examples include developers miss to add checks or input validation is not properly performed. The developers are trying to put efforts to identify and prevent Injection attacks but failed to do so properly in every required location. These examples further give proof that defensive coding cannot completely remove the SQLIA.
With the introduction of pseudo rectification methods, the defensive coding practices are not extensively taken into consideration. Two of such methods can be discussed as follows In One of the methods, the input for SQL keywords is verified. The keywords include SELECT, WHERE, FROM and operators like comment and single quote. The idea behind this approach is that there may be an attempted injection attack with the presence of these keywords. This method jeopardizes and gives false positive results as many applications have SQL keywords in normal text input and there may be Sql operators usage in formulae. The second approach