Evaluating the Modsecurity Web Application Firewall Against SQL Injection Attacks

SQL injection attacks target databases of web servers. The ability to modify, update, retrieve and delete database contents imposes a high risk on any website in different sectors. In this paper, we investigate the efforts done in the literature to detect and prevent the SQL injection attacks. We also assess the efficiency of the Modsecurity web application firewall in preventing SQL injection attacks.

1. Introduction

Web applications have the advantage of being publicly accessible from everywhere around the world, and their services are available to almost anyone. A lot of information is distributed daily through web applications, it can include private and confidential data which are stored in the database of the webserver along with other data specific to the website itself.