#injectiondescription

Many people treat injection only as an input validation problem (CWE-20) because many people do not distinguish between the consequence/attack (injection) and the protection mechanism that prevents the attack from succeeding. However, input validation is only one potential protection mechanism (output encoding is another), and there is a chaining relationship between improper input validation and the improper enforcement of the structure of messages to other components. Other issues not directly related to input validation, such as race conditions, could similarly impact message structure.

The table represents common consequences associated with the injection attacks and their impact on CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability). The Scope identifies the application security area that is violated, while the Impact describes the negative technical impact that arises if an adversary succeeds in exploiting this weakness. Injection attacks are marked with the likelihood of exploit of High.

The most important issue to note is that all injection problems share one thing in common — i.e., they allow for the injection of control plane data into the user-controlled data plane. This means that the execution of the process may be altered by sending code in through legitimate data channels, using no other mechanism. While buffer overflows, and many other flaws, involve the use of some further issue to gain execution, injection problems need only for the data to be parsed. The most classic instantiations of this category of weakness are SQL injection and format string vulnerabilities.

application security testing tools into the CI/CD pipeline to identify introduced injection flaws before production deployment.

The attacker can only carry out this form of attack when certain features are enabled on the database server used by the web application. This form of attack is primarily used as an alternative to the in-band and inferential SQLi techniques. Out-of-band SQLi is performed when the attacker can’t use the same channel to launch the attack and gather information, or when a server is too slow or unstable for these actions to be performed. These techniques count on the capacity of the server to create DNS or HTTP requests to transfer data to an attacker.