Book Image

Oracle Database 12c Security Cookbook

By : Zoran Pavlovic, Maja Veselica
Book Image

Oracle Database 12c Security Cookbook

By: Zoran Pavlovic, Maja Veselica

Overview of this book

Businesses around the world are paying much greater attention toward database security than they ever have before. Not only does the current regulatory environment require tight security, particularly when dealing with sensitive and personal data, data is also arguably a company’s most valuable asset - why wouldn’t you want to protect it in a secure and reliable database? Oracle Database lets you do exactly that. It’s why it is one of the world’s leading databases – with a rich portfolio of features to protect data from contemporary vulnerabilities, it’s the go-to database for many organizations. Oracle Database 12c Security Cookbook helps DBAs, developers, and architects to better understand database security challenges. Let it guide you through the process of implementing appropriate security mechanisms, helping you to ensure you are taking proactive steps to keep your data safe. Featuring solutions for common security problems in the new Oracle Database 12c, with this book you can be confident about securing your database from a range of different threats and problems.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Oracle Database 12c Security Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Introduction


Oracle Virtual Private Database (VPD) is a security feature, introduced in Oracle Database 8i. It is available only in Enterprise Edition of Oracle Database. Discretionary access control (DAC) grants/restricts access to data at an object level (for example, table level). This means that a user can access either the entire data in a table or no data. VPD enables you more granular control over security of your data. Using VPD, you can restrict access to data at row level or column level.

Note

VPD doesn't replace DAC, but it is complimentary to DAC. VPD can further restrict access to users who have been given access to data by DAC.

There are five types of policies based on how often a policy function is evaluated:

  • DBMS_RLS.DYNAMIC

  • DMBS_RLS.STATIC

  • DBMS_RLS.SHARED_STATIC

  • DBMS_RLS.CONTEXT_SENSITIVE

  • DBMS_RLS.SHARED_CONTEXT_SENSITIVE

DBMS_RLS.DYNAMIC is default.

Although it is not necessary to use application contexts when implementing VPD policies, it is a common practice. Figure 1 shows usual...