Oracle injection

👉 Overview

👀 What ?

Oracle injection is a technique used to attack data-driven applications where malicious SQL statements are inserted into an entry field for execution. It's a code injection technique that exploits a security vulnerability in an application's database layer.

🧐 Why ?

Understanding Oracle injection is crucial due to its potential to compromise data integrity and security. An attacker can use Oracle injection to gain unauthorized access to a database, alter or delete data, or execute administrative operations on the database. The attack can lead to data theft, data loss, or even complete system compromise.

⛏️ How ?

Oracle injection attacks usually occur when an application uses input to construct dynamic SQL statements or when it uses 'unsafe' JDBC calls like 'Statement'. To mitigate the risk, use prepared statements, stored procedures, or validate user input before using it in a SQL query. Also, limit the permissions of the database login used by the application.

⏳ When ?

Oracle injection attacks have been known and used since the late 1990s, with the increased usage of data-driven applications and websites.

⚙️ Technical Explanations

Oracle injection, a subset of SQL injection, is a type of vulnerability that occurs when an application does not properly validate input before passing it to an SQL statement that will be executed by an Oracle database. An attacker can use this vulnerability to manipulate the SQL statement and perform unauthorized actions on the database. The principle at the heart of Oracle injection is the ability of an attacker to manipulate SQL queries. This is possible when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and unexpectedly executed. Oracle databases have specific functionalities that can be exploited if they are not properly secured. For instance, the use of 'DBMS_ASSERT' can help prevent Oracle SQL injection if used correctly.