Lesson Plan Title: How to Create Database Back Door Attacks.

Concept / Topic To Teach:

How to Create Database Back Door Attacks.

How the attacks works:

Databases are used usually as a backend for web applications. Also it is used as a media of storage. It can also be used as a place to store a malicious activity such as a trigger. A trigger is called by the database management system upon the execution of another database operation like insert, select, update or delete. An attacker for example can create a trigger that would set his email address instead of every new user's email address.

General Goal(s):

Your goal should be to learn how you can exploit a vulnerable query to create a trigger.
You will not be able to actually create one in this lesson because the underlying database engine used with WebGoat doesn't support triggers.
Your login ID is 101.

Figure 1 Database backdoor

Solution:

Enter your user ID 101 to see how the application works.

Figure 2 User ID is 101

As you probably noticed, the input is not validated so very easy to do SQL Injection. To have two SQL queries executed, you need to separate them using a sem-colon. For example select * from employees; drop table employees will first select all the users from employees and then drop the table employees. Not all databases support multiple SQL statements.

Here you need to update the salary of the employees. This requires an update query like update employees set salary=10000.

Inject this for the user ID: 101; update employee set salary=10000

Figure 3 Update query

Figure 4 Stage 1 completed

To create a database trigger, you need to inject the following SQL: CREATE TRIGGER myBackDoor BEFORE INSERT ON employee FOR EACH ROW BEGIN UPDATE employee SET email='john@hackme.com'WHERE userid = NEW.userid

Figure 5 Insert trigger

Figure 6 Lesson completed

Solution by Erwin Geirnaert |