[kmoser]

I don't understand your logic. Knowledge of the schema can give an attacker an edge because they now know the exact column names to probe. Whether these probes get logged is irrelevant; even if it makes the system more vulnerable for an instant, it's still more vulnerable.

Even if logging failed queries is your metric, then knowledge of column names would make it more likely for an attacker to craft correct queries, which would not get logged, thus making your logs less useful than if the attacker had to guess at column names and, in so doing, incur failed queries.

[tptacek]

To probe for what? How does knowledge of a column name make it easier for me to discern whether a SQL injection vulnerability exists? I've spent a lot of time in my career probing for SQL injection, and I can't remember an instance where my stimulus/response setup involved the table names.

SQL injection is a property of a SQL query, not of the schema itself. To have a meaningful chance of blind-one-shotting a query, getting a TRUE/FALSE answer about susceptibility without ever generating a SQL syntax error, I would need to see the queries themselves.

[kmoser]

Knowledge of the column names doesn't give you insight into whether a vulnerability exists. It gives you insight into what you can do with a vulnerability, should it exist. For example, if you want to set your account balance to $1 million, you'd need to know the column name in order to generate a valid query. Without advance knowledge of the column name, your job becomes harder.

[hot_gril]

SQL injection will give you the entire schema anyway. It doesn't help if someone tells you the col names beforehand. I'm more wondering about non-SQL-injection vulns.

[HDThoreaun]

SQL injection isnt just an ssh tunnel to the database. If the line you've injected isnt a select and the backend never fetches it how does the injection give you the column names?

[hot_gril]

Wait, this is known as a blind SQLi, and it's not so blind. You can still use timing to get the info you need one bit at a time. This may be slow, but it's doable without triggering any DB errors, so you have time.

[HDThoreaun]

people come up with the darndest things.

[wglb]

I've seen this done by enumerating possible table names.

[hot_gril]

That's a typical way, but the errors might alert them, and of course maybe the names aren't so easily guessed.

[hot_gril]

Oops you're right, it's possible that you have no way to read things back.

[default-kramer]

> How does knowledge of a column name make it easier for me to discern whether a SQL injection vulnerability exists?

It doesn't. It just means that as soon as you find one, you can immediately begin crafting valid queries instead of randomly guessing table names and columns, therefore not setting off the "DB query failed" alert.

EDIT: I guess this is the part I missed:

> To have a meaningful chance of blind-one-shotting a query, getting a TRUE/FALSE answer about susceptibility without ever generating a SQL syntax error, I would need to see the queries themselves.

Really? I guess I have to take your word for it because I've never attempted it, but I would have thought that in some (horribly broken) systems `bobby tables' or 1=1 --` would have a very reasonable chance of detecting SQL injection without alerting anyone.

[jstanley]

You can craft valid queries that don't reference any table or column name.

[default-kramer]

Right, and that's what you use to find the vulnerability. But imagine you've found the vulnerability and now you want to use it to update all of your parking tickets as paid. Without the schema, this is going to be quite tricky and will generate a lot of failed SQL. With the schema, you might be able to do it on your first try.

[tptacek]

Which is why in the ordinary course of a pentest you'd use the SQL injection vulnerability to recover the information in the schema.

[LegionMammal978]

Is there not any SQLi vulnerability in practice that doesn't allow such an information recovery? That is, is the schema-recovery step so foolproof that it can always be performed on any target form? GP is suggesting that this may be difficult, depending on the kind of signal that gets returned from the form.

[default-kramer]

Maybe I'm ignorant, but if the account the app is using doesn't have access to the information_schema how do you do this?