Sania: Syntactic and semantic analysis for automated testing against SQL injection

With the recent rapid increase in interactive web applications that employ back-end database services, an SQL injection attack has become one of the most serious security threats. The SQL injection attack allows an attacker to access the underlying database, execute arbitrary commands at intent, and receive a dynamically generated output, such as HTML web pages. In this paper, we present our technique, Sania, for detecting SQL injection vulnerabilities in web applications during the development and debugging phases. Sania intercepts the SQL queries between a web application and a database, and automatically generates elaborate attacks according to the syntax and semantics of the potentially vulnerable spots in the SQL queries. In addition, Sania compares the parse trees of the intended SQL query and those resulting after an attack to assess the safety of these spots. We evaluated our technique using real-world web applications and found that our solution is efficient in comparison with a popular web application vulnerabilities scanner. We also found vulnerability in a product that was just about to be released.