The limit() query method is susceptible to catastrophic SQL injection with MySQL.

For example, given a model User for a table users:

UserQuery::create()->limit('1;DROP TABLE users')->find();

This will drop the users table!

The cause appears to be a lack of integer casting of the limit input in either Propel\Runtime\ActiveQuery\Criteria::setLimit() or in Propel\Runtime\Adapter\Pdo\MysqlAdapter::applyLimit(). The code comments there seem to imply that casting was avoided due to overflow issues with 32-bit integers.

This is surprising behavior since one of the primary purposes of an ORM is to prevent basic SQL injection.

This affects all versions of Propel: 1.x, 2.x, and 3.

References

• propelorm/Propel2#1463
• propelorm/Propel2#1464
• propelorm/Propel2@cd23d73
• https://github.com/FriendsOfPHP/security-advisories/blob/master/propel/propel/2018-02-14.yaml