SQLAlchemy + SQL Injection

If you have any "special" characters (such as semicolons or apostrophes) in your data, they will be automatically quoted for you by the SQLEngine object, so you don't have to worry about quoting. This also means that unless you deliberately bypass SQLAlchemy's quoting mechanisms, SQL-injection attacks are basically impossible.

[per http://www.rmunn.com/sqlalchemy-tutorial/tutorial.html]

To add to @Tendrid answer. I did a little investigation using quiet naive approach. filter method has *criterion as its argument, several other ORM Query methods have similar argument.

In case of filter method *criterion argument ends up passed into _literal_as_text, which in case of string - marks it as safe sql (please correct me if I'm wrong). Therefore it makes it unsafe.

Here is outcome of ORM Query class method investigation with *criterion argument:

filter   - uses _literal_as_text (NOT SAFE)
having   - uses _literal_as_text (NOT SAFE)

distinct - uses _literal_as_label_reference (NOT SAFE)
group_by - uses _literal_as_label_reference (NOT SAFE)
order_by - uses _literal_as_label_reference (NOT SAFE)

join     - uses model attributes to resolve relation (SAFE)

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Examples of possible method missuses (to keep it simple, string formatting is skipped):

db.session.query(User.login).group_by('login').having('count(id) > 4; select name from roles').all()
db.session.query(User.login).distinct('name) name from roles /*').order_by('*/').all()
db.session.query(User.login).order_by('users_login; select name from roles').all()
db.session.query(User.login).group_by('login union select name from roles').all()

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Note that these methods are only unsafe if string literal is passed.

tldr: Avoid raw SQL as much as possible.

The accepted answer is lazy and incorrect. The filter method accepts raw SQL, and if used in that way, is fully susceptible to SQL injection attacks. For instance, if you were to accept a value from a url and combine it with raw sql in the filter, you are open to attack:

session.query(MyClass).filter("foo={}".format(getArgs['val']))

using the above code and the below url, you would be injecting SQL in to your filter statement. The code above would return all rows in your database.

URL encoded:

https://example.com/?val=2%20or%201%20=%201

Easier to understand (URL decoded):

https://example.com/?val=2 or 1 = 1