Dennis,
I must respectfully disagree with 1. I would suggest that the 'can'
be changed to a 'cannot'. It is this type of person that will stand up and
say 'This is wrong.' Therein lies your security.
Dan Fink
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2002 7:19 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Jared - I think Thomas has a good point. Here is the way I look at it:
1. Make the server with critical information as secure as possible.
2. Restrict command line or console access to the minimum number of people.
This narrows you down to a few sys admins and DBAs. For them your choices
are:
1. Hire trustworthy professionals, people that can be intimidated by the
threat of being fired.
2. Hire people too stupid to understand how to break into stuff.
3. Configure a really paranoid system to keep the people that must manage
the system from being able to do their job. You could spend a lot of extra
effort on this one. And it would have to be designed and audited by people
outside the company.
Years ago, a company I worked for tried option 3. It was a mainframe
system with no interactive access. There were three groups of people that
worked there, keypunch operators, programmers, and computer operators. The
theory was that to defraud the system would require more than one person. A
programmer could write a bogus program, but couldn't run it, would need an
operator. And so on. They even had a separate building entrance for each
group. Nobody outside of management seemed to think it was all that secure.
Dennis Williams
DBA
Lifetouch, Inc.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2002 7:14 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Jared,
Nice question. I don't have an answer, but a comment.
It all comes down to Risk Management. In my opinion, Risk Management
entails identifying all known risks to losing or changing data in an
authorized manner. Once the risks are identified and explained to the
organization, they decide what needs to be dealt with and what they are
willing to "risk" based on the probability of the event actually happening.
In your example, you've identified the risk of allowing other people admin
access on the database server machine. If management is unwilling to revoke
these privs, then they need to understand the risk that they have accepted.
The risk they've accepted is that someone could, thru the use of stolen
passwords, the BBED editor, or simply deleting a database file, cause a
disruption, loss of service or loss of data to the organization. And there
is not much you (as the DBA) can do about it.
I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here. But a lot of what we (DBA's) do
comes down to communication and education of management, and explaining
things in terms that they can understand.
Hope this helps.
Tom Mercadante
Oracle Certified Professional
-----Original Message-----
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 6:05 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Dear list,
Let me toss a hypothetical situation at you.
Say some auditors looked at some of your primary systems,
and concluded that they had no assurance that someone with
admin access to the server had not changed financial information
to benefit themselves, or to falsify financial records for the
gain of the company.
Not that they might have any proof that something like that
had been done, but rather, just not proof that it had *not*
been done.
I've been pondering this for a bit, and it seems to me that if
someone had good knowledge of both the OS and the
database (Oracle), as well as having admin rights on the
server, there are few things you can do to prevent such a person
from changing data in the database, and completely
covering his or her tracks.
The platforms in question are Unix, Windows NT and
Windows 2000. I've limited it to those as most database
systems use one of those, and besides, that's all I know. :)
Consider what steps you might take to audit unauthorized
transactions performed by an admin.
Oracle Auditing could be used, but someone with admin
access to the server and database could easily alter the
records created by system auditing.
You could create an audit table, using a trigger to audit
sensitive tables. A materialized view on a remote database
could be created on sensitive tables to remotely log all
actions.
In the case of the audit table, that could easily be disabled,
and then re-enabled after the nefarious DML had completed.
The materialized views might be more difficult to circumvent.
If the remote end is using a dblink to the server employing a
password that is *different* than that of it's own account at the
remote server, it should be impossible for someone to completely
cover the traces of transactions created to falsify data.
The MV Logs could be dropped, but without access to the MV's
at the remote server, the MV's would have to be left in place.
These could be used as a reference to look for unauthorized transactions
in the primary server. If this same admin has access to the remote
server where the MV's are, then this can also be circumvented.
There is also the logs created as when logging in as internal
or sysdba. ( $ORACLE_HOME/rdms/audit/*.aud )
These can simply be deleted. Some system could be used to save
these to a remote server, but it would have to run *very* frequently to
be effective.
Oracle password files could also be used. While this can prevent
someone from logging in as SYS or SYSTEM while in place, all it
takes is a change to init.ora, and a database bounce to fix that.
Make your bogus data changes, change the init.ora back and
bounce the database again.
A somewhat clever person could set this up to automatically
take place the next time the DB is bounced.
The conclusion I have come to is that the only effective method
that could be used to create an audit trail for such a scenario is
to create Materialized Views on sensitive tables, and create them
on a server that admins are guaranteed to not have access to.
Of course, I may be missing something. I'm not always one to
catch all the details right off. Input, comments, suggestions, far
out ideas are all welcome.
If you've read this far, thanks!
Jared
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