Security/Guides/SQL Queries and 3rd Party Packages

SQL Queries
Connecting your application and database layers can pose security risks. Notably, SQL injection (SQLi). Below is an outline of the do's and dont's of executing SQL queries in MediaWiki.



Never Correct
MediaWiki developers MUST NOT directly execute SQL queries through PHP's database extension functions (such as  or  ). While this is not so much for security reasons, it helps with maintainability. Using the MediaWiki database wrappers helps ensure your queries end up at the correct database (which may or may not be the same as where the wiki itself is stored), and handles things like table prefixes.

Directly build a SQL string in one of these provided functions makes the developer responsible for escaping the SQL parameters themselves. Otherwise, applications can be susceptible to SQL injection.

In this very simple example, no validation is done on the input, and as such, passing something like could result in more rows being dumped than expected, as the SQL becomes:

Even when you do use the MediaWiki wrappers, you should be careful about quoting values manually, and should use appropriate functions such as  and   when necessary. These examples below would still be potentially vulnerable to SQLi. It is generally better to assume the input is coming from an untrusted source, and as such, allow escaping to happen as necessary. It's better to quote and it not be needed, than not quote because it's not currently needed, and someone add a different usage of your code later, and pass in untrusted input, opening up an SQLi vector.

Most queries have dedicated wrappers that you should used. For  queries, don't use the , use.

This is still wrong though!

Usually Correct
Most of the time, developers SHOULD use existing wrapper functions like  or   to perform SQL queries. When passing in parameters to these wrapper functions, it is important to know when you need to manually use  on raw user data. correctly escapes the provided input (such as values in  statements) to help prevent SQL injection vectors.

For simple queries ( or , the database wrappers will take care of escaping input for you. Manually calling   this is unnecessary. You can pass an int, an array or a string in the same way, and the code will deal with it. For a single value,   will be used, and when passed an array   will be used instead.

If you want to do other queries in statements such as  with operators like   or , you will need to do some manual escaping yourself, such as done in the first example.

SelectQueryBuilder
As of MediaWiki 1.35, developers MAY use the SelectQueryBuilder class to create SQL  statements. This class allows function chaining so SQL queries are more easily readable and don't require specifically formatted input parameters (like  does).

Similar to the older wrappers, parameters to SelectQueryBuilder wrapper functions such as  still may need to be escaped via   before being passed in, if doing something more than a simple equality (such as   or  ).

Rarely Correct
Rarely, developers MAY use  to execute a custom SQL query, one that does not fit within the parameters of the IDatabase wrapper functions or the. This is useful for queries that are explicitly DBMS-dependent and are unsupported by the query wrappers such as.

3rd Party Packages
Installing 3rd party packages in MediaWiki and other WMF projects can be incredibly useful, but also has the opportunity to introduce security risks.

NPM
MediaWiki and other WMF projects SHOULD NOT directly install (via ) non-WMF NPM packages in production environments (WMF packages being anything in the NPM Wikimedia organization). When you install an NPM package you not only install itself, but the tens or hundreds of other dependencies it relies on. . At the end of the day, you're introducing untrusted code onto production machines that could do anything from steal ssh keys to access secure files on the hard drive. Many WMF projects do however have npm packages listed in their. These packages are used solely for local development (e.g. testing or linting).

Ideally, WMF projects try to avoid using external libraries as much as possible by relying on in-house packages and/or writing the functionality ourselves. However, sometimes that is not possible. If using a 3rd party package however is necessary, developers SHOULD instead commit the 3rd party package source code to the project itself. Since a majority of security risks are introduced at install time, it is better to avoid doing the install on project startup.

MediaWiki core for example, has a series of NPM packages loaded using ResourceLoader. We can see an example of how this is done by looking at how MediaWiki uses moment, a JavaScript date/time library. Instead of listing  in , the source code lives under. MediaWiki can now  just like it would any other NPM package. Committing the source code allows the 3rd party code to be audited, and prevents untrusted code from being run on production machines. A full registry of 3rd party packages used in MediaWiki core are listed in  file.

Composer
MediaWiki and other WMF projects do however have Composer packages installed in production environments. These are generally considered safer due to having less dependencies on average and are audited more frequently by the Security Team.

Contacting the Security Team
Still have questions? Don't be shy! The Security Team welcomes any and all questions you may have. When in doubt, just get in touch with the Security Team.