Ghosts in DBMS: Revealing the Security Impacts of Silent Fixes

Jialiang Dong, Zihan Ni, Willy Susilo, Siqi Ma. 2025. Lecture notes in computer science.

Read the paper · doi:10.1007/978-981-95-3182-0_3

What this paper does with SQLancer

Query partitioning is named in related work as one of the techniques prior efforts have used to find these issues, listed with validity-guided fuzzing, graph-based query transformations and syntax abstraction frameworks. That single sentence is the whole connection; the paper's own method is studying fix commits. This paper studies silent fixes in DBMSs -- security-relevant bugs repaired without an advisory or a CVE -- and what their quiet handling means for downstream users, who cannot tell that upgrading matters. Written by claude-opus-5 from the 2 places this paper refers to SQLancer. The quotations below are the paper's own words, stored verbatim when the text was extracted.

How it was classified

uses infrastructure — no

SQLancer is cited as related work; no reuse of its code, generator or workload is described.

extends technique — no

No SQLancer technique is extended; the citation is background.

compares with — no

No empirical comparison against SQLancer or one of its oracles is reported.

describes as state of the art — no

The text does not describe SQLancer as the state of the art.

SQLancer publications it cites (3)

Bibliography entries that resolved to a SQLancer publication, or to a paper by one of the project's authors. A sentence citing one of these numbers is a reference to SQLancer even when it never writes the name.

#	Entry	Matched as
38	Rigger, M., Su, Z.: Finding bugs in database systems via query partitioning. Proc. 35th ACM Program. Lang. (OOPSLA) 4, 1–30 (2020)	sqlancer publication · TLP
40	Jiang, Y., Liu, J., Ba, J., Yap, R.H., Liang, Z., Rigger, M.: Detecting logic bugs in graph database management systems via injective and surjective graph query transformation. In: Proceedings of the 46th IEEE/ACM Int...	project authored
43	Fu, J., Liang, J., Wu, Z., Zhao, Y., Li, S., Jiang, Y.: Understanding and detecting sql function bugs: using simple boundary arguments to trigger hundreds of dbms bugs. In: Proceedings of the 20th European Conference ...	project authored

Every place it refers to SQLancer (2)

2 sentences, each stored verbatim from the extracted text with where it was found and how. “Citation marker” means the sentence names no tool at all and was reached through a reference number that resolved to a SQLancer publication.

Id	Sentence	Found by	Where
M1	Prior eﬀorts have addressed such issues using query partitioning [ 38], validity-guided fuzzing [ 39], graph-based query transformations [ 40], and syntax abstraction frameworks [ 41].	technique background	6 Related Works page 16
M2	Besides, DBMSs suﬀer from domain-speciﬁc vulnerabilities such as transaction anomalies [ 42], where real-world cases compromise consistency guarantees, and ﬂaws in built-in SQL functions [ 43].	citation marker project authored	6 Related Works page 16

This page is rendered from _data/papers/paper_doi_10_1007_978_981_95_3182_0_3.json, extracted from supplied pdf. 19 pages, 45 references parsed.