LDAP Injection

LDAP Injection is considered as a specific form of attack which could be employed in order to compromise websites which construct LDAP or Lightweight Directory Access Protocols statements coming from the data being provided by the users. This could be done through changing the LDAP statements in order for dynamic applications could run along with invalid permissions wherein attackers are allowed to alter, delete or add content. LDAP is also referred as protocol which facilitates the location of individuals, organizations and some other resources in a certain network. It is also considered as streamlined version of the Directory Access Protocol or DAP, known as a standard for network directory services.

LDAP injection would therefore works in much the same as SQL injection which is a type of security exploit wherein the attacker would add Structured Query Language or SQL code into a web form input box in order to gain access to the resources or create some changes into the data. Based on some security experts, the principal reason why LDAP Injection as well as similar exploits is popular is that the security is actually not emphasized sufficiently in a certain application development. In order to protect the integrity of the web sites as well as applications, most experts are recommending the implementation of the simple precautions during development like controlling the numbers and types of characters which are being accepted through input boxes.

There is a fact that LDAP Injection is a widely-used open standard protocol both for manipulating and querying information directories. This LDAP protocol would run over internet transport protocols like TCP. Web applications might use user-supplied input in order to create custom LDAP statements intended for dynamic web page requests. This kind of injection is a technique in terms of exploiting web applications which use client-supplied data within LDAP statements having not to strip first potentially harmful characters coming from the request.

Once a certain application fails to sanitize properly user-supplied unit it would be possible that the attacker could alter the LDAP statement construction. Once the attacker is capable of modifying the LDAP statement, the process might run along with the same permissions being the component which executed the command. This might offer serious problems on security wherein the permissions grant the rights to modify or query or remove anything inside the tree of LDAP.

How to protect from LDAP injection attacks?

To protect the LDAP-enabled web applications would demand great effort of the developers and also the LDAP administrators. Approaches could be considered as solutions but there is still a need to remember that web application security should be a continually evolving process. Since there is a fact that hackers have also changed their methodologies, so there is also a need for those that are implementing secure web application to do so as well. This could include incoming data validation, outgoing data validation and also LDAP configuration. And considering LDAP injection cheat sheet could be an option in order to improve the LDAP security. This is considered as the summary of the things you definitely need to know about LDAP injection.