Another thing (little off topic with db), I think you are putting data validation and data security in the same bag ....

Data security consists in transporting data with maximum safety and totally control the execution of the content. Data validation consists in the execution of a set of rules to verify that the provided data fits the requirements.

Do these tasks in seperate time and space ! They're not dependent.
You must trust your data validation routines, so get them in a secure room !

Postgres provides huge things to validate your data, because it is a database management system, and it is its job to provide you your data validated as you wanted it to be ! For simple data validation, domains should do the trick. If your looking for something more refined, take a look to constraints and triggers.

Have a good day.

free tip: In postgres, you can use regexp with the ~ operator.

Le 23/08/2013 14:58, zbouboutchi a écrit :
Hi,

your dbms is higly capable to recognize bad inputs himself, I think you should'nt try to interfere with this. Instead of this, usually SQL injection is prevented by escaping dangerous things like ' or ;... Web.py already provides this method. An example is given here: http://webpy.org/cookbook/query
BTW, you can go on your own with your prefered strategy. ;)

For SQL, I usually use some functions of mine who use base64 to «transport» the parameters encoded in base64 inside the query. I use postgres' native decoding to get the human readable data into the tables.

For js/html/etc, I use mako's functions to escape naughty strings came from another world ;). I think all «templators» have this possibility and you should'nt worry about this, use one of them.

Regards,

Christophe.


Le 23/08/2013 11:11, Steven Brown a écrit :
I have been busy scrubbing and validating my inputs, and trying to read up on how to avoid SQLI attacks, but I am being confounded by incomplete information, possibly due to my own lack of experience and knowing what/how to search on this topic. web.py's lack of usable documentation doesn't help either.

For numeric inputs, I can and do validate aggressively; if a field should be a number and has non-numerics, I just strip them out. I have a couple of dropdowns and just make sure that the input exactly matches one of the options. But my application has several fields that simply cannot be validated, except maybe by stripping out non-printables; though that presents its own issues, because I have no idea how to allow for foreign characters if I whitelist. Anyway, examples of such fields are:

comments
a URL
username
password

The URL field presents its own challenges; I think there is a URL-encoding function, somewhere, in a different python library maybe, that I should be using. But my big question is, the SQL, and then when I want to display these things on a webpage, how exactly to make sure nothing screws up the webpage.

For the SQLI attacks, it seems to me that if I strip out non-printables and escape single quotes, that should be enough.....but that seems too easy, and it seems the consensus is not to do that (roll your own blacklist/escaping scheme). In fact, the consensus seems to be to use these "prepared statements," but I cannot figure out what web.py can provide me regarding this. The last time I brought this up, Dragan mentioned that I should use web.py's built-in dB functions, which I would love to do.....but I don't know what that necessarily means. I've been using db.insert('tablename', column1=column1_python,....), is this enough? What about select statements? Those are the ones that I have been using just string concatenation, which is, according to what I have been able to find out, the Most Horrible Thing Ever, but if you know what is being concatenated, I don't see what the big deal is. I'm perfectly willing to do things the Right Way, I'd just like to know what that is. I tried looking into psycopg2, which is what web.py seems to use (I'm using PostGres), but their examples all use cursors, which I don't think I am, at least not directly, and rather than just forge ahead blindly, I wanted to ask if there was something I was missing.

Then there is displaying these things. I'm mostly worried about the comments field, but anytime I am displaying arbitrary data, I imagine there is potential to do terrible things in HTML/with JavaScript. ATM, I am anticipating always putting things *between* tags, and never inside them. For example, if I am displaying comments, I would just put <div class='comments'> $comment_from_database </div> . Do I need to do anything other than escape < and >, or does web.py actually just take care of everything for me, since I'm not using $: ?



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