Unsafe SQL functions in Laravel

Recently the folks from Spatie released a security update for their laravel-query-builder package. Turns out it was vulnerable to SQL Injection.

At the core of the vulnerability is the fact that Laravel offers a shorthand for querying only certain fields of JSON data, but that these do not get escaped when converted to a json_extract function.

Brent has a detailed writeup on this:

Instead of manually writing json_extract, we can use the simplified -> syntax, which Laravel will convert to the correct SQL statement.

Blog::query()
    ->addSelect('title->en');

SELECT json_extract(`title`, '$."en"') FROM blogs;

Be careful though: Laravel won’t do any escaping during this conversion.

If you were to change title->en – which could come from a URL or user input – to title->en'#, you’re in …

Thankfully by now a fix authored by Brent has landed in Laravel 5.8.11 🙂

Unsafe SQL functions in Laravel →
An important security release for laravel-query-builder →