Book Image

Oracle 11g Anti-hacker's Cookbook

By : Adrian Neagu
Book Image

Oracle 11g Anti-hacker's Cookbook

By: Adrian Neagu

Overview of this book

For almost all organizations, data security is a matter of prestige and credibility. The Oracle Database is one of the most rich in features and probably the most used Database in a variety of industries where security is essential. To ensure security of data both in transit and on the disk, Oracle has implemented the security technologies to achieve a reliable and solid system. In Oracle 11g Anti-Hacker's Cookbook, you will learn about the most important solutions that can be used for better database security."Oracle 11g Anti-hacker's Cookbook" covers all the important security measures and includes various tips and tricks to protect your Oracle Database."Oracle 11g Anti-hacker's Cookbook" uses real-world scenarios to show you how to secure the Oracle Database server from different perspectives and against different attack scenarios. Almost every chapter has a possible threads section, which describes the major dangers that can be confronted. The initial chapters cover how to defend the operating system, the network, the data and the users. The defense scenarios are linked and designed to prevent these attacks. The later chapters cover Oracle Vault, Oracle VPD, Oracle Labels, and Oracle Audit. Finally, in the Appendices, the book demonstrates how to perform a security assessment against the operating system and the database, and how to use a DAM tool for monitoring.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Oracle 11g Anti-hacker's Cookbook
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


The number of security threats related to operating systems and databases are increasing every day, and this trend is expected to continue. Therefore, effective countermeasures to reduce or eliminate these threats must be found and applied. The database administrators and system administrators should strive to maintain a secure and stable environment for the systems they support. The need for securing and ensuring that the database servers are operational is crucial, especially in cases in which we are working with mission critical systems that require uninterrupted access to data stored in Oracle Databases.

In this chapter, we will focus on some operating system security measures to be taken to have a reliable, stable, and secure system. Obviously operating system security is a vast domain and to cover this subject in a few pages is not possible. However, we can briefly describe several key items that can provide a starting point to address some of the concerns we will highlight in our recipes.

Briefly, the possible operating security threats are:

  • Denial of service

  • Exploits and vulnerabilities

  • Backdoors, viruses, and worms

  • Operating system bugs

Recommendations and guidelines:

  • Develop a patching policy.

  • Perform security assessments regularly.

  • Try to use hard-to-guess passwords.

  • Disable direct root login and create a special login user. It would be also easier to perform auditing.

  • Limit the number of users.

  • Limit the number of users who can issue the su command to become the root or oracle owner user.

  • Limit the number of services started, use only the necessary ones.

  • Limit the number of open ports.

  • Refrain from using symbolic links whenever possible.

  • Do not give more permissions to users than is necessary.

  • Secure ssh.

  • Use firewalls.

In these series of recipes for the server environment, we will use the operating system Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.0 (Santiago) 64-bit version. For the client environment we will use the Fedora 11 update 11 64-bit version. The server hostname will be nodeorcl1 and the client hostname will be nodeorcl5. All machines used are virtual machines, created with Oracle Virtual Box 4.1.12.

As a preliminary task before we start, prepare the server environment in terms of kernel parameters, directories, users, groups, and software installation as instructed in Oracle® Database Installation Guide 11g Release 2 (11.2) for Linux (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E11882_01/install.112/e24321/toc.htm). Download and install Oracle Enterprise Edition 11.2.0.3, create a database called HACKDB, configured with Enterprise Manager and Sample Schemas, and define a listener called LISTENER with a default port of 1521.

Due to the limited page constraints, we will omit the description of each command and their main differences on other Linux distributions or Unix variants. The most important thing to understand is the main concept behind every security measure.