Re: Prepared Statements

On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 11:01:56AM -0400, Richard Welty wrote:
> On Tue, 22 Jul 2003 02:30:02 +1200 Oliver Jowett <oliver(at)opencloud(dot)com> wrote:
> > On Mon, Jul 21, 2003 at 10:18:19AM -0400, Dmitry Tkach wrote:
>
> > > You can't possibly hope that JDBC driver will take care of alll of the
> > > security risks for you. If you don't know how to write safe code,
> > you'll
> > > be doomed. If you do, then you do not need help from jdbc driver. JDBC
> > > driver's whole purpose is to provide an abstraction layer between a
> > > database and an application program.
> > > It has nothing to do with security whatsoever.
> ...
> > Even if it was true, it's still better to have one piece of code that
> > does
> > the escaping, rather than N different ones. With escaping in the JDBC
> > driver, you've reduced the scope of the code you need to audit for syntax
> > from "all query strings and all parameters" to "the JDBC driver's
> > parameter-escaping code and all query strings".
>
> eewwww.
>
> in a multi-tier architecture where the code that actually talks to
> the database is isolated from the GUI, this is a totally unreasonable
> expectation -- you really need to audit fields in the GUI, not somewhere
> way back in the code.

I was very careful to say "audit for syntax". You certainly want to make
sure you have input validation earlier on, too! -- but you don't need to
worry about, for example, correctly escaping strings that could validly have
a bare "'" in them before you pass them to the DB.

-O