What Permissions Does Your Database User REALLY Need?

What Permissions Does Your
Database User REALLY Need?
Dan Cornell
CTO, Denim Group
@danielcornell

© Copyright 2012 Denim Group - All Rights Reserved

My Background
• Dan Cornell, founder and CTO of
Denim Group

• Software developer by background
(Java, .NET, etc)

• OWASP San Antonio, Global
Membership Committee

© Copyright 2012 Denim Group - All Rights Reserved 1

Who has deployed a web
application to production
attached to its database as
the “sa” or “root” user?


LIARS!

The Weakest Link


Web Application Database User Permissions
• Data = Value
• Web Applications Are Front-Ends For Web
Databases
• Web Applications Are Full of SQL Injection
Vulnerabilities

• Therefore: Choosing You Web Database User
Permissions Has a Large Potential Impact On
Your Security Posture

Problems With Web Database Access Security
• Nearly all applications use a single database user
to access the database
– Masks the true identity of the caller to the database
• Too often this user is hyper-privileged
• Why?
– Lazy configuration management for production environment
– DBA attitude of “one app – one schema – one user”
– “Too hard” to figure out what permissions are needed
– Schema ownership required by 3rd party code


Result
• Any SQL injection vulnerability exploit owns the entire
database
– Schema: Map it out
– Data: INSERT, UPDATE, SELECT, DELETE
• Whole “Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability” thing: out
the window
• This can even be automated:
– sqlmap: http://sqlmap.sourceforge.net/
• If that database user‟s privileges extend beyond the database
supporting the vulnerable application…


Test Environment
• (Crappy) PHP Web Application: Crap-E-Commerce
• Database Access With Full Permissions


Environment Setup Tips
• If you want to symlink to the commerce/ examples on OS X
– http://tlrobinson.net/blog/2008/06/mac-os-x-web-sharing-apache-and-symlinks/

• Use „127.0.0.1‟ rather than „localhost‟ for the MySQL database host
– http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3968013/cakephp-no-such-file-or-directory-
trying-to-connect-via-unix-var-mysql-mysq


What Is Wrong With Our Target Application?
• Process:
– Scan with OWASP ZAProxy to find vulnerabilities:
http://code.google.com/p/zaproxy/
– Use sqlmap to see what we can find

• Results:
– Publicly-accessible SQL injections!


Sqlmap Results
• Command
– ./sqlmap.py -u http://localhost/~dcornell/commerce/order.php?order_id=1 --dump-all

• Data retrieved:
– All of it…


Actual Business Impact

• From sqlmap: Lost all data in the database:
– Usernames and passwords
– Order history
– Full credit card information

• Additional possibilities: UPDATE, DELETE,
INSERT


We Need To Make Some Progress


That Was With a Powerful Database User

So what happens if we deploy the
application with a less powerful
user?

To do this we need to know what
access a legitimate user needs…

What Privileges Does a Database User Need?
• Ask the development team
– Good luck with that
– Do they even know given frameworks and abstraction layers like ORMs
– Doesn‟t scale

• Ask the DBA
– Double good luck with that
– Doesn‟t scale

• Inspect the code
– Ugh
– Error prone
– Doesn‟t scale


Any Way To Automate This?
• Interesting Article:
– http://www.teamshatter.com/topics/general/team-shatter-exclusive/what-are-my-
users%E2%80%99-effective-database-privileges/
– See http://www.petefinnigan.com/tools.htm for more along these lines
• Less than ideal
– What assets can this user access?
versus
– What assets does the user need to access?

• Could be helpful determining possible impact of a breach


Other Permission Calculation Tools
• .NET Permission Calculator Tool (Permcalc.exe)
– http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165077(v=vs.90).aspx

• Stowaway (Android Permissions Calculator)
– http://www.android-permissions.org/

• Both of these tools appear to rely solely on static analysis
– Makes sense from a coverage standpoint
– Would be really hard for databases potentially accessed by multiple applications


Alternate Approach
• Dynamically analyze traffic to the database server

• Use that traffic as a “representative sample” of required database
access

• Create user permissions based on this

• Why?
– Static analysis is really hard to get exactly right – this relies on observed behavior


sqlpermcalc
• Tool that calculates the least-privilege database permissions required
to execute a given set of SQL queries
– Written in Python
– https://github.com/denimgroup/sqlpermcalc

• Helper tools:
– Start and stop MySQL logging
– Capture query log from a MySQL database

• Relies on python-sqlparse for basic SQL parsing support
– https://code.google.com/p/python-sqlparse/
– Thanks Andi Albrecht! (http://andialbrecht.de/)


An Aside: “Pythonic”
• Definition of “pythonic”
– “To be Pythonic is to use the Python constructs and data structures with clean,
readable idioms”
– http://faassen.n--tree.net/blog/view/weblog/2005/08/06/0

• At this point sqlpermcalc is more … “python-ish”
– Enjoy 
– Any Python gurus are more than welcome to help with cleanup…


Support Tools
• Turn on MySQL logging with mysql_start_logging.sh
– Not recommended for use in production because of potential performance impact
– Also we‟re logging to MySQL tables rather than a log file – even worse

• Retrieve MySQL log data with mysql_get_logfile.sh
– Pulls queries from a given user into a local .sql file

• Turn off MySQL logging with mysql_stop_logging.sh
– Stops logging


Process
• Stop webserver
• Turn on MySQL logging
• Start webserver
• Exercise application
• Retrieve logs
• Turn off MySQL logging
• Analyze logs for permission usage


Calculating Permissions

• SELECT
• INSERT
• UPDATE
• DELETE


SELECT Permissions
• Can control on a table-wide basis
• Can control on a per-column basis for a table
• WHERE clause will require additional SELECT permissions

• Scenarios:
– SELECT * FROM MyTable
– SELECT col1, col2, col3 FROM MyTable
– SELECT * FROM MyTable WHERE col1 = 1 AND col2 = 2 OR col3 = „three‟
– SELECT col1, col2 FROM MyTable where col3 = „three‟


INSERT Permissions

• Scenarios:
– Full table: INSERT INTO MyTable VALUES (1, 2, „three‟)
– Columns in table: INSERT INTO MyTable (col1, col2, col3) VALUES (1, 2, „three‟)


UPDATE Permissions
• WHERE clause will require SELECT permissions as well

• Scenarios:
– UPDATE MyTable SET col1 = 1
– UPDATE MyTable SET col2 = 2 WHERE col3 = „three‟


DELETE Permissions
• Can only control on a table-wide basis
• WHERE clause will require SELECT permissions as well

• Scenarios:
– DELETE FROM MyTable
– DELETE FROM MyTable WHERE col1 = 1


A Note About Wildcards
• DELETE always impacts all columns in a table
– Hence it only has table-level permissions – not column-level
• SELECT and INSERT sometimes impact all columns in a table
– SELECT * FROM MyTable
– INSERT INTO MyTable VALUES (1, 2, „three‟)

• Currently we do not “know” the actual database schema
– Therefore we do not know all of the actual column names
– So instead we track „*‟ to represent “all columns”

• This should not cause problems
– What we see accessed in the queries should be what we need to access


What Permissions Are Actually Needed?
• INSERT
– CommerceUser: email,first_name,last_name,password
– CreditCard: CVV,expiration,number,type
– OrderItem: order_id,price,product_id,product_name,quantity

• SELECT
– CommerceUser: *
– Order: date,total,user_id
– OrderItem: price,product_id,product_name,quantity
– Product: *


Given The Model We Can Generate GRANTs
• For MySQL we need to know the user account name and
host for access
GRANT INSERT (email,first_name,last_name,password) ON
sqlpermcalc_commerce.CommerceUser TO 'spc_publiclow'@'localhost';
GRANT INSERT (CVV,expiration,number,type) ON sqlpermcalc_commerce.CreditCard
TO 'spc_publiclow'@'localhost';
GRANT INSERT (order_id,price,product_id,product_name,quantity) ON
sqlpermcalc_commerce.OrderItem TO 'spc_publiclow'@'localhost';
GRANT SELECT ON sqlpermcalc_commerce.CommerceUser TO
'spc_publiclow'@'localhost';
GRANT SELECT (date,total,user_id) ON sqlpermcalc_commerce.Order TO
'spc_publiclow'@'localhost';
GRANT SELECT (order_id,price,product_id,product_name,quantity) ON
sqlpermcalc_commerce.OrderItem TO 'spc_publiclow'@'localhost';
GRANT SELECT ON sqlpermcalc_commerce.Product TO 'spc_publiclow'@'localhost';


Impact of Slimmed-Down Permissions?


Re-Run sqlmap
• Can still recover a whole lot of data
– But not the credit card data (or even the credit card primary key IDs)
– So that is better. Kinda

• But…
– No UPDATE or DELETE access to any tables
– Limited INSERT access

• What Does That Get Us?
– Can‟t INSERT into Products or modify Products
– Automated SQL worms can‟t “infect” the site with malware via SQL injection
– So that is definitely better


Other Uses
• Insight into database usage
– Do you have any idea what database assets your web application touches?
– Even if you don‟t generate new user permissions, you can still use this to explore

• Forensic review over time
– Gather usage logs from production servers at intervals?
– Why did this app suddenly start using additional permissions?

• Compare multiple user roles or applications
– What does each need to do?
– How are the access needs different?


Calculating Permission for Multiple Scenarios
• Hosting Multiple Applications Accessing the Same Database(s)
– Two applications (public and admin) share several databases
– Public site is read-only and heavily cached
– Admin site is read/write
– During series of attacks we had to manually calculate constrained permissions

• Hosting Same Application In Different VMs
– Cannot make code changes but need to harden infrastructure
– Host different configuration files for database access
– Example: Falling Rock Networks Armored Stack infrastructure
• http://www.fallingrocknetworks.com/armored-stack.html


Limits of This Approach
• Assumes that assets touched during a test run are all that a legitimate
user session will ever need
– If we miss something we will see runtime errors
– Likely needs re-calculation when code is changed
– Comprehensive unit/regression test suite can help (Rugged DevOps!)

• Many applications require a lot of access so the security benefit might
not be as great as desired
– In the example application: we still lost usernames/passwords


Current sqlpermcalc Limitations
• Only supports basic SQL functionality
– SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE

• Parsing is still crudimentary
– More advanced SELECT statements – JOINs, subqueries – are not yet supported
– Precludes use for apps using common frameworks and tools

• Only tested on MySQL
– Every databases SQL dialect is a little different
– Every database has different ways to grant/revoke privileges


Next Steps
• Improve the SQL supported by the parser
– Support all SQL queries generated by Hibernate for a non-trivial application
– Look into adding support for stored procedures

• Clean up code
– This is kind of “scripty” right now
– Allow others to use the capabilities
– Make it more Pythonic
– http://kennethreitz.com/repository-structure-and-python.html

• Support for other databases
– Pull MS SQL Server queries from the Profiler


Other Stuff To Look At
• SE PostgreSQL: https://code.google.com/p/sepgsql/


Get The Code
• sqlpermcalc on Github: https://github.com/denimgroup/sqlpermcalc
– sqlpermcalc Python code
– Example Crap-E-Commerce app
– Support scripts for MySQL


Conclusions and Questions

Dan Cornell
dan@denimgroup.com
Twitter: @danielcornell

www.denimgroup.com
github.com/denimgroup/sqlpermcalc
(210) 572-4400


What Permissions Does Your Database User REALLY Need?

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