How to say you’re vulnerable to code injection without saying you’re vulnerable to code injection.
Are they vulnerable though, if they already exclude it at the user input?
I yet have to learn SQL and is there a way to allow passwords with '); DROP TABLE… without being vulnerable to an injection?
nevermind i googled it, and there various ways to do so
This still smells though. Why is the raw, plain text password string getting anywhere near database queries in the first place?
Prepared statements, mostly. You define the query using variables, turn that query into a language-dependent object, assign values to those variables, then execute the statement. The values will be passed verbatim, without any parsing.
Or, since we’re talking about a password, you could encode or encrypt it before inserting it into the query string. The fact that the website could be negatively affected by phrases in the cleartext password is very concerning.
No one in their right mind is storing plain text passwords, or letting them anywhere near the database.
You convert the password to a hash, and store that. And the hash will look nothing like the password the user typed.
You’re right. No one in their right mind would do that.
On the other hand, people not in their right mind often run things. Such as my old professional liability insurance. Which wrote the username and password in the yearly statements…
And also sent you the password through email if you forgot it…
Also you couldn’t change it…
Maybe they filtered those strings to be safe, and put the notice there to answer the invertible “why won’t it accept my password” queries.
It’s a shitty password engine. But not necessarily uncleansed
If they’re trying to protect themselves from code injection by rejecting certain user input like that, then they don’t actually know how to protect themselves from code injection correctly and there may be serious vulnerabilities that they’ve missed.
(I think it’s likely that, as others have said, they’re using off-the-shelf software that does properly sanitize user input, and that this is just the unnecessary result of management making ridiculous demands. Even then, it’s evidence of an organization that doesn’t have the right approach to security.)