Writing a SQLMap tamper for Google Protobuf

Many developers believe that serializing traffic makes a web application more secure, as well as faster. That would be easy, right? The truth is that security implications remain if the backend code does not adopt adequate defensive measures, regardless of how data is exchanged between the client and server. In this article we will show you how the serialization can’t stop an attacker if the web application is vulnerable at the root. During our activity the application was vulnerable to SQL injection, we will show how to exploit it in case the communications are serialized with Protocol Buffer and how to write a SQLMap tamper for it.