Combinatorial methods for dynamic gray‐box SQL injection testing

• Published in: Software testing, verification & reliability Vol. 32; no. 6
• Main Authors: Garn, Bernhard, Zivanovic, Jovan, Leithner, Manuel, Simos, Dimitris E.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Chichester Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.09.2022
• Subjects: Applications programs; Case studies; Combinatorial analysis; combinatorial testing; Data base management systems; Grammars; gray‐box testing; Optimization; Prototypes; Query languages; Security; security testing; SQL injection; web applications
• ISSN: 0960-0833; 1099-1689
• DOI: 10.1002/stvr.1826

Summary This work presents an extended and enhanced gray‐box combinatorial security testing methodology for SQL injection vulnerabilities in web applications. We propose multiple new attack grammars modelling SQLi attacks against MySQL‐compatible databases, each one targeting a different injection context. Additionally, these grammars are also dynamically refined at the beginning of each attack against an endpoint of a web application, as a further optimization of the used attack model by taking into account the specifics of the generated query of that endpoint. Our goal is to enhance existing combinatorial approaches for detecting SQL injection vulnerabilities. The newly developed methodology is implemented in a prototype security testing tool called SQLInjector+, which is an extension of an earlier prototype developed by us in prior work. This improved tool can attack (i.e. test) any web application that uses a MySQL‐compatible database management system. We evaluate our revised approach and improved prototype tool in a case study comprising of different kinds of web applications to which SQLi is a potential security threat. The case study contains the well‐known verification framework WAVSEP among other five real‐world web applications and one web application firewall. Our generated attack vectors, constructed via combinatorial methods applied to our improved and dynamically optimized attack grammars, are capable of injecting every known vulnerable endpoint in WAVSEP and also of finding new vulnerable parameters in some of the real‐world applications investigated in this paper. Our approach performs equally well or better when compared with existing state‐of‐art of SQL injection security testing tools (sqlmap, w3af, wapiti and fuzzdb) across all tested web applications in the case study. This work presents a gray‐box combinatorial security testing methodology for detecting SQL injection vulnerabilities in web applications. New attack grammars modelling SQL injections are proposed. This combinatorial security testing approach performs equally well or better when compared to existing state‐of‐the‐art SQL injection security testing tools.