Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Syracuse University

SQL Injection Attack Lab

Overview

SQL injection is a code injection technique that exploits a security vulnerability occurring in the database layer of an application. The vulnerability is present when user input is either incorrectly filtered for string literal escape characters embedded in SQL statements or user input is not strongly typed and thereby unexpectedly executed.

Many web pages take parameters from web user, and make SQL query to the database. Take for instance when a user login, web page that user name and password and make SQL query to the database to check if a user has valid name and password. With SQL Injection, it is possible for us to send crafted user name and/or password field that will change the SQL query and thus grant us something else. In this lab, we'll exploit SQL injection on phpBB2 forum.

Lab Description and Tasks (PDF)

    For instructors: if you prefer to modify the lab description to suit your own courses, you can download the source files (Latex) from here.

Recommended Time

  • Supervised lab environment: 1 hour
  • Unsupervised environment (e.g. take-home project): 1 week

Lecture Video: (watch)

Helpful Links

Student Feedbacks

To help us understand how effectively this lab has enhanced students' learning in computer security, we asked students to fill out an anonymous survey right after they finish the lab. We started to conduct the survey since 2007. The survey results depicted in the following are aggregate results over several years.