XPath Injection
XPath injection is attackers injecting XPath metacharacters into a query expression to bypass authentication or extract XML data.
Purpose
To understand injection caused by concatenating XPath queries and its defenses; a common vulnerability in XML data querying.
Mechanism
The program builds XPath with //user[name=X]; the attacker sets X to " or "1"="1 to construct an always-true query. Defenses: parameterized XPath, input escaping.
Use cases
- XML query security
- XPath audit
- Query injection defense