requires breaking through bad input sanitisation to bypass pricing logic.
The result is the displayed on the "Order Confirmation" screen. Copy this key and submit it to the Security Shepherd scoreboard to complete the challenge.
Security Shepherd is an online platform that offers a series of challenges to help individuals learn about web application security, including SQL injection. Challenge 5 is a part of this series, focusing on SQL injection attacks.
Security Shepherd's SQL Injection Challenge 5 (the "new" variant) is a deliberately vulnerable web application module designed to teach advanced SQL injection techniques and defenses. The challenge typically involves exploiting blind and logical/boolean-based SQL injection, bypassing input filters, chaining multiple injections, and extracting data from multiple tables. This review covers objective goals, attack surface, exploitation steps, payloads, mitigation recommendations, and assessment of difficulty and learning value. sql+injection+challenge+5+security+shepherd+new
However, the challenge introduces a critical defensive measure: the application escapes any single quote character ( ' ) by adding a backslash, turning it into \' . This escaping is designed to neutralize standard SQL injection attempts that use single quotes to terminate string literals. Importantly, the application does modify double quotes ( " ).
: Validate all inputs against a strict schema to reject malformed or suspicious requests. Deploy a Web Application Firewall (WAF)
You realize that ( \ ) are not filtered. In MySQL, a backslash escapes the following character. But here, you don’t need quotes if you can inject without them. requires breaking through bad input sanitisation to bypass
input field. Unlike earlier challenges that might use simple login forms, this one requires you to extract data from a table you don't initially see. Course Hero 2. Construct the Payload The backend likely uses a query similar to:
Replace 1,2,3 with table names or column names, or directly target the coupon table: 1' UNION SELECT NULL, coupon_code, NULL FROM coupons -- Step 4: Submitting the Solution
The constructed query becomes: SELECT note FROM notes WHERE user_id = 2 AND note LIKE '%' OR '1'='1%' Security Shepherd is an online platform that offers
Example: ' AND SUBSTRING((SELECT coupon_code FROM coupons), 1, 1) = 'A' --
Enter a standard, benign string such as WELCOME20 to verify how the application behaves on a failed query (e.g., "Invalid Coupon" or "No results found"). Step 2: Injecting the Logical Tautology
The backend SQL query, as revealed by the challenge's hint, is structured as follows:
Forcing input into specific patterns, like email structures or specific alpha-numeric ranges.