Developer Finds SQL Injection Flaw Hidden in Plain Sight by Mislabeled Database Layer

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A software developer building a web GIS platform discovered a SQL injection vulnerability in their own codebase after noticing a database layer mysteriously named '1' had never served any map tiles. The layer had been created when a user-supplied name starting with a digit caused a syntax error during automatic SQL view generation, with the exception silently caught and logged rather than surfaced. The root cause was that layer names entered by users were inserted directly into DDL statements via Python f-strings, with no validation or sanitization, meaning a crafted name could execute arbitrary SQL commands. The developer fixed the issue by switching to psycopg2's sql.Identifier and sql.Literal classes, which safely quote and escape user-supplied values before they reach the database. The incident illustrates how a seemingly harmless data anomaly can reveal a serious security flaw, and the author noted the broken layer — not a security audit — was what ultimately exposed the vulnerability.

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