Imagine you’re a developer who’s been given a task to develop a software application that uses a number of pages with dynamic content? While each page will have dynamic content, it’ll also have some standard features such as the header, footer, navigation menu at the top, etc. You know straight away that it’ll take you very long to work on all pages separately and add such bits. You will probably look for a smart solution. This is where an SSI (Server Side Includes) Injection comes in handy.
An SSI Injection is an extremely functional feature that can help you save a lot of time while building applications that require dynamic content. Such injections work similar to an HTML injection that has been into play for many years now. An SSI injection is a very useful, reusable and a time-saving component.
In technical terms, an SSI Injection is a server-side injection using which a developer can send any code into another application, so it can be executed later by another web server. SSIs are more like directives that are present on multiple web applications that can help feel HTML pages to serve up dynamic content. SSI injections are much better than their predecessors because they can be used to execute actions and code even before the current page loads or even before the end customer sees it to meet their needs.
Using an SSI injection, a developer can exploit any web application’s failure to be able to sanitize dynamic data before it is even added to the server side. Hackers can also use SSI injections to their benefit and access sensitive information and execute shell commands.
SSIs are also called PERL language-based HTML commands that allow developers to ask for information or data from a server. In its methodology, SSI injections work a lot like ASP applications. Some developers think that in reality, many ASP applications work a lot like SSI injections. The basic formula behind SSI injections is that they are used to post and gather data from different servers and remotely serve that data to other web applications when needed. That way, you bypass all browser version problems and simply start concentrating on real data and dynamic content that your end customers need.
How are SSI injections coming into play today? In today’s technology-driven world, many UNIX servers are set up with the ability to run SSI injections. Developers who use Windows NT-based servers may still have to use ASP to get similar effects as you would with SSI injections. Windows servers have also started to be set up so they can run SSI injections, but not all are compatible at this stage, so ASP is your second best bet.
In terms of the types of SSI injections, there are mainly three types:
- SSI commands that include another type of file,
- Commands that get times and dates from the server, and
- SSI commands that display any kind of file-related information. So, this guide is a good starting point for SSI injections and how they work.
