Preventing Injection Attacks Through Proper Output Encoding
SQL injection, XSS, and command injection all exploit improper encoding. Learn context-aware encoding strategies that prevent injection in HTML, SQL, and shell.
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Tags: security, encoding, injection
Preventing Injection Attacks Through Proper Output Encoding Injection attacks — SQL injection, command injection, XSS, LDAP injection, XML injection — are not fundamentally different problems. They all share the same root cause: user-supplied data is interpreted as code or control syntax by a downstream system. The defense in each case follows the same principle: encode data for the output context it is being placed into. When data is correctly encoded, a downstream interpreter receives it as data, not as instruction. This article covers the encoding requirements for each major injection context, with concrete code examples. --- Why Injection Happens Consider this SQL query: The developer intended to be data. The SQL parser sees a string, but string delimiters are control syntax. If is ,…
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