Pete Freitag Pete Freitag

Devnet Article on Securing CF From SQL Injection

Published on April 09, 2009
By Pete Freitag
coldfusion

I was just reading through this article on Adobe Devnet titled Secure your ColdFusion application against SQL injection attacks, and I have a few issues with the article.

On Page 5 the article says:

Additionally when you use the following code it ensures that the value contains only letters and numbers: <cfqueryparam value="#strDescription#" CFSQLType="VARCHAR">

That is incorrect. Using cfsqltype="varchar" does NOT ensure the value contains only letters and numbers. It will certainly protect you from SQL Injection, but not from Cross Site Scripting Injection (because it allows characters such as < >, etc) as that statement may lead you to believe.

Next the author totally ripped off my script for adding simple SQL Injection detection to scriptprotect, that I blogged in 2005, no attribution. Not that I really want attribution for that method anyways, as doesn't protect from very many SQL Injection attack vectors. The blog entry was posted more as a look what you can do, rather than this is what you should do.

Another issue I have with the article is that it doesn't address that variables other than URL and FORM variables need to be protected. You can have SQL Injection in cookies, CGI variables, HTTP headers, etc. Anything that is sent in the HTTP request needs to be protected.

I hope Adobe will edit the article, as it can be very dangerous to have incorrect information about security coming from a source that many people trust.



sql injection security coldfusion scriptprotect devnet

Devnet Article on Securing CF From SQL Injection was first published on April 09, 2009.

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