  Web applications are becoming an essential part of our everyday lives. Many
of our activities are dependent on the functionality and security of these
applications. As the scale of these applications grows, injection
vulnerabilities such as SQL injection are major security challenges for
developers today. This paper presents the technique of automatic query
sanitization to automatically remove SQL injection vulnerabilities in code. In
our technique, a combination of static analysis and program transformation are
used to automatically instrument web applications with sanitization code. We
have implemented this technique in a tool named ASSIST (Automatic and Static
SQL Injection Sanitization Tool) for protecting Java-based web applications.
Our experimental evaluation showed that our technique is effective against SQL
injection vulnerabilities and has a low overhead.
