The vast majority of people who visit your website see search bars as nothing more than shortcuts to find information quickly.
They can use these search bars as input fields to look up information about your company, other user profiles, files, and so forth. Along with the browser’s URL bar, these fields help them find what they need and navigate the site effortlessly.
Another use for input fields is to access a part of a gated system. Here, users generally have two boxes to fill: username and password. If the credentials they enter match what’s in your database, then great – their identity is confirmed, and they can access your back end, app or gated resources.
What’s going on under the hood of these queries is what’s interesting to hackers. In the wrong hands, the same protocol that locates data and authenticates users can lead malicious actors to sensitive data.
One kind of protocol that’s used here is known as Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP for short. LDAP is essentially a language that lets users communicate with the database of the website. It sends what a user types in the text box (an LDAP query) straight to the LDAP server. And based on the nature of this input, LDAP returns a response.
A skilled hacker can manipulate these queries. With special commands and characters, they can trick the input fields and change the logic of the query. All they need is a single LDAP vulnerability.
If the flaw is there, threat actors can confuse the logic of the LDAP language by inserting special characters. For example, they can insert malicious code. In cybersecurity, those exploits are known as LDAP injection attacks.
These attacks can cause a lot of damage. In the worst-case scenario, a threat actor gains access to parts of the database where you store sensitive data, where they can delete or steal files from the depository. Another possibility is that they get into your system after completely bypassing user authentication. All of these paths can lead to a data breach.
How can you find high-risk flaws before hackers do? Let’s take a look at some of the best ways to prevent LDAP injection attacks.
Apply the Right Encoding Function
The first thing you’ll want to do is choose a proper LDAP encoding function. We want to escape all variables. Essentially, you need to set strict rules that won’t let the hacker trick the input field with special characters, triggering commands you don’t approve of.
But let’s start from the basics. What is encoding, exactly?
Encoding is translating information into a format computers can understand, but also work with. Every user input has to be encoded – meaning, converted into special characters and symbols. When hackers are looking to manipulate an input field, they look for the things that you haven’t encoded properly, such as special characters.
In web development, special characters (such as “,&, <, >, ') already have a particular meaning. For example, “&” can be used to form a query string, tricking the system into misinterpreting it as a command. Therefore, you need to make sure that any special characters are treated as regular text. If the system sees it as part of the query, that can harm your site.
The best option is to escape all variables. Here, you’re making sure that the user can’t even use special characters. You’re preventing them from altering the behavior of LDAP queries. One recommended solution here is LINQ to LDAP, a framework that ensures you escape variables automatically.
Limit User Privileges to Minimize Potential Damage
In cybersecurity, vulnerabilities can slip through the cracks. To protect yourself in case of a successful LDAP injection, apply the Least Privilege principle.
Why is this important? LDAP flaws can lead hackers to sensitive data if they bypass authorization.
If your website or app gets compromised, criminals shouldn’t gain deeper access to the entire system, and they shouldn't be able to see all the data that privileged administrator accounts can see.
Therefore, if a hacker gets into one user account, it’s important that they won’t be able to access all the databases you have. Setting up the Least Privilege principle for accounts to limit access for users. Restrict it to the minimum a user needs to perform their function.
Sanitize User Input
Successful LDAP exploits begin with the injection of malicious code. To prevent the hacker from sneaking in the harmful code, you have to sanitize the user input.
In this context, sanitizing means:
- Triple-checking the user input to detect harmful strings or characters
- Making sure that data entered by users is clean and safe to use
- Checking all inputs, such as login fields and HTTP headers
- Removing potentially harmful inputs
Create an allowlist for the user input, which determines which inputs are allowed and which aren’t. Only those marked as safe should get a green light.
Sanitizing is similar to encoding, as discussed above. The main difference is that sanitization is more focused on removing or filtering out potentially damaging elements, while encoding rewrites queries into the best format for your system.
Test Your Security Against LDAP Injection Attacks
Hackers can’t compromise you if they don’t find a weakness that leads them to an entry point. To discover high-risk flaws that might lead to successful hacking early, regularly test your LDAP queries. Make sure to repeat these tests at every stage of the development process.
When the latest version of an application passes the test, you know it’s ready to be released for users. Repeat tests until it does.
When you write test scripts for LDAP injection attacks, you’re anticipating all the ways that your code could be compromised using LDAP queries. Run these to see what happens on your website or app.
Do you already use LDAP queries and aren’t sure if they’re vulnerable? You can test them by following this checklist:
- Identify all of the LDAP integration points on your website, especially if they lead to sensitive data.
- Write test cases that include both regular uses and potential injections.
- Test LDAP queries using those test scripts.
- After injecting malicious code, pay attention to the response – were the attempts rejected and sanitized right away?
- Pay attention to how your web application responds to errors during testing.
- Automate test scripts.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, the prevention of LDAP injection attacks is all about protecting valuable assets, such as sensitive data. Start with using proper encoding, sanitize user inputs, limit user privileges, test the LDAP queries, and repeat.
Those are the four most common and basic preventive measures. It can also be a good idea to use comprehensive tools such as Web Application Firewalls. These solutions can safeguard sites from versatile threats, LDAP injections included.
