How to prevent SQL injection in PHP ?

How to prevent SQL injection in PHP?

Almost, Experienced Developers are knowing this, and also implementing its solution.

We can use prepared statements and parameterized queries. These are SQL statements that are sent to and parsed by the database server separately from any parameters. This way it is impossible for an attacker to inject malicious SQL.

You basically have two options to achieve this:



Using PDO:

$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM employees WHERE name = :name');

$stmt->execute(array(':name' => $name));

foreach ($stmt as $row) {
    // do something with $row
}

Using mysqli:

$stmt = $dbConnection->prepare('SELECT * FROM employees WHERE name = ?');
$stmt->bind_param('s', $name);

$stmt->execute();

$result = $stmt->get_result();
while ($row = $result->fetch_assoc()) {
    // do something with $row
}

Note that when using PDO to access a MySQL database real prepared statements are not used by default. To fix this you have to disable the emulation of prepared statements. An example of creating a connection using PDO is:

$dbConnection = new PDO('mysql:dbname=dbtest;host=127.0.0.1;charset=utf8', 'user', 'pass');

$dbConnection->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES, false);
$dbConnection->setAttribute(PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE, PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION);

In the above example the error mode isn't strictly necessary, but it is advised to add it. This way the script will not stop with a Fatal Error when something goes wrong. And gives the developer the chance to catch any error(s) which are thrown as PDOExceptions.

What is mandatory however is the setAttribute() line, which tells PDO to disable emulated prepared statements and use real prepared statements. This makes sure the statement and the values aren't parsed by PHP before sending it the the MySQL server (giving a possible attacker no chance to inject malicious SQL).

Although you can set the charset in the options of the constructor it's important to note that 'older' versions of PHP (< 5.3.6) silently ignored the charset parameter in the DSN.

Hope this post helped,
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