Despite being well documented for several years now, every now and then we still run into clients that have bad experiences because of SQL injection attacks. If you’re not familiar, a SQL injection attack happens when an attacker exploits an application vulnerability in how they pass queries and data into the database and insert their own malicious SQL code to be executed. If you want to see different examples and get the full details, the Wikipedia page is very comprehensive.
Depending on how the application is configured, this kind of attack can go all the way from enabling attackers to see data they shouldn’t, to dropping an entire database if your application is allowed to do so. The fact that it’s an application based vulnerability also means that it really depends on proper coding and testing of all inputs in the application to prevent it. In other words, it can be very time-consuming to go back and plug all the holes if the application wasn’t securely built from the ground up.
Built-in Threat Detection
To attack this issue, and as part of the ongoing security story of SQL Server, Microsoft has now invested in the feature called Database Threat Detection. When enabled, the service will automatically scan the audit records generated from the database and will flag any anomalies that it detects. There are many patterns of injections so it makes sense to have a machine be the one reading all the SQL and flagging them. MS is not disclosing the patterns or the algorithms in an effort to make working around the detection more difficult.
What about on-premises?
This feature right now is only available on Azure SQL Db. However, we all know that Azure SQL Db is basically the testing grounds for all major new features coming to the box product. I would not be surprised if the threat detection eventually makes it to the on-premises product as well (my speculation though, nothing announced about this).
Pre-requisites
For this new feature you will need Azure SQL Db, you will also need to have auditing enabled on the database. The current way this works is by analyzing the audit records so it’s 100% reactive, nothing proactive. You will need a storage account as well since that’s where the audit logs get stored. The portal will walk you through this whole process, we’ll see that in the demo video.
Current State
As I mentioned, right now the tool is more of a reactive tool as it only lets you know after it has detected the anomaly. In the future, I would love to see a preventive configuration where one can specify a policy to completely prevent suspicious SQL from running. Sure, there can always be false alarms, however, if all the application query patterns are known, this number should be very low. If the database is open to ad-hoc querying then a policy could allow to only prevent the queries or even shut down the database after several different alerts have been generated. The more flexible the configuration, the better, but in the end what I want to see is a move from alerting me to preventing the injection to begin with.
In the demo, I’m going to go through enabling Azure SQL threat detection, some basic injection patterns and what the alerts look like. Let’s check it out!
Click here to view the video on YouTube.
Original article: SQL On The Edge #9 – Azure SQL Database Threat Detection.
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