It seems sometimes that every time you turn around you see a new article concerning SQL Injection. Recently when I was brushing up on my ASP to create www.Database-Security.Info, I found out why SQL Injection seems to be a reoccurring problem within ASP pages. Most of the basic examples found on the web and in books during my studies would lead any beginning ASP programmer to create pages just ripe for SQL Injection. It was this problem of overly simplified examples that lead me to create this two-part series to give web developers a chance to look at another way of lessening the threat of SQL Injection; parameterized stored procedures. Keep in mind that both of these articles are using ASP with SQL Server 2000 as the back-end, but you should be able to apply the basic concepts to any back-end platform that has the ability to parameterize its stored procedures. Also keep in mind that many of the articles advocate validating any data received from users before utilizing that data in your processes, you should still perform validation on any user input data even if you are utilizing parameterized stored procedures. This series of articles will explain the basic of using parameterized stored procedures to show you that even if you missed something during your input cleanup, you can still protect yourself by using stored procedures.

Being a DBA at heart and training, it did not take much of a leap for me to move from the embedded SQL found in most ASP pages to stored procedures for my own pages. What I found during this transition was one major benefit: Parameterized stored procedures are a great method to lessen chances of SQL Injection. Yes, you should still validate user input and watch how you use parameterized stored procedures, but if you do these two steps you can almost eliminate the threat from SQL Injection.

In this series of articles I would like to show two examples of how parameterized stored procedures should lessen the threat of SQL Injection. The article will cover the ever-present Logon screen and how it is often used to attack a web site with SQL Injection. The second article will cover a more complex method of utilizing stored procedure parameters to create a dynamic stored procedure for a search screen.