When is it best to sanitize user input?

Question

User equals untrustworthy. Never trust untrustworthy user\'s input. I get that. However, I am wondering when the best time to sanitize input is. For example, do you blindly

Answer 1

I sanitize my data right before I do any processing on it. I may need to take the First and Last name fields and concatenate them into a third field that gets inserted to the database. I'm going to sanitize the input before I even do the concatenation so I don't get any kind of processing or insertion errors. The sooner the better. Even using Javascript on the front end (in a web setup) is ideal because that will occur without any data going to the server to begin with.

The scary part is that you might even want to start sanitizing data coming out of your database as well. The recent surge of ASPRox SQL Injection attacks that have been going around are doubly lethal because it will infect all database tables in a given database. If your database is hosted somewhere where there are multiple accounts being hosted in the same database, your data becomes corrupted because of somebody else's mistake, but now you've joined the ranks of hosting malware to your visitors due to no initial fault of your own.

Sure this makes for a whole lot of work up front, but if the data is critical, then it is a worthy investment.