or to provide their own directives and use <code>ap_dbd_prepare</code>.</p>
</section>
+<section id="security">
+<title>SECURITY WARNING</title>
+ <p>Any web/database application needs to secure itself against SQL
+ injection attacks. In most cases, Apache DBD is safe, because
+ applications use prepared statements, and untrusted inputs are
+ only ever used as data. Of course, if you use it via third-party
+ modules, you should ascertain what precautions they may require.</p>
+ <p>However, the <var>FreeTDS</var> driver is inherently
+ <strong>unsafe</strong>. The underlying library doesn't support
+ prepared statements, so the driver emulates them, and the
+ untrusted input is merged into the SQL statement.</p>
+ <p>It can be made safe by <em>untainting</em> all inputs:
+ a process inspired by Perl's taint checking. Each input
+ is matched against a regexp, and only the match is used,
+ according to the Perl idiom:</p>
+ <example>
+ <pre><code> $untrusted =~ /([a-z]+)/;
+ $trusted = $1;</code></pre>
+ </example>
+ <p>To use this, the untainting regexps must be included in the
+ prepared statements configured. The regexp follows immediately
+ after the % in the prepared statement, and is enclosed in
+ curly brackets {}. For example, if your application expects
+ alphanumeric input, you can use:</p>
+ <example>
+ <code>"SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE input = %s"</code>
+ </example>
+ <p>with other drivers, and suffer nothing worse than a failed query.
+ But with FreeTDS you'd need:</p>
+ <example>
+ <code>"SELECT foo FROM bar WHERE input = %{([A-Za-z0-9]+)}s"</code>
+ </example>
+ <p>Now anything that doesn't match the regexp's $1 match is
+ discarded, so the statement is safe.</p>
+ <p>An alternative to this may be the third-party ODBC driver,
+ which offers the security of genuine prepared statements.</p>
+</section>
<directivesynopsis>
<name>DBDriver</name>
<description>Specify an SQL driver</description>
password, database name, hostname and port number for connection.</p>
<p>Connection string parameters for current drivers include:</p>
<dl>
+ <dt>FreeTDS (for MSSQL and SyBase - see SECURITY note)</dt>
+ <dd>username, password, appname, dbname, host, charset, lang, server</dd>
<dt>MySQL</dt>
- <dd>host, port, user, pass, dbname, sock</dd>
+ <dd>host, port, user, pass, dbname, sock, flags, fldsz, group, reconnect</dd>
+ <dt>ODBC</dt>
+ <dd>datasource, user, password, connect, ctimeout, stimeout, access, txmode, bufsize</dd>
<dt>Oracle</dt>
<dd>user, pass, dbname, server</dd>
<dt>PostgreSQL</dt>