I was doing the laundry the other day and thinking about SQL Injection. I have this fancy front load model that lets me load fabric softener and bleach into containers for release later, and it occurred to me that if my washing machine were connected to the Internet with some API, it's possible someone could SQL Inject or buffer overrun a string that might release a stream of bleach into my colors.

Not terribly dangerous, but it could be annoying, and it is exactly the type of hack some bored teenager would come up with. Then I started thinking about what else they might do. I wrote about the possibilities with cars recently, but what else could a hacker do in a connected world. What if someone could ignite my oven? Likely it wouldn't do much more than cost me money. Turning up my fridge might make a mess of food, but not dangerous. However what if someone could turn off the lights when they saw you start running down the stairs?  That could be dangerous.

What if they could remotely enable your sprinklers while you were at work. In some places that could result in a fine. Allowing that to happen a few times might get you arrested. Locking or unlocking your car doors (already a remote possibility) could endanger you. I'm sure there are more malicious possibilities I haven't thought of, and as we move to a more connected world, I worry we will discover them only when some crime has been committed.

I like the convenience of adding digital controls and remotes to more parts of our lives, but I do worry that we are doing so in a way that ignores security. Linking the convenience items of our lives to remote digital controls can be dangerous enough. Adding in more essential items, like heating, engines, etc., to the same control bus could be fatal.

SQL Injection will likely be around for a long time, and it will get used in many new ways as more and more aspects of our lives are digitized. All developers should be aware of how an injection attack occurs, and code to be sure that we don't allow any un-sanitized input into any of our databases, and that we also require separate authentication for the parts of a system that need more security.

Steve Jones

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