Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I saw a post on Niall's blog last night about the new ability to drop datafiles in the new Oracle 10g Release 2. This is a great new addition. How many times do you see seemingly extra database, indeed how many times have you done it yourself! - created one that is. Niall's post is titled "a cure for idiocy". This feature should mean that file system layouts are not spoiled from a designed layout. An extra datafile added by accident could be a very slim security hazard because they could end up not being secured properly and be readable or even writable by world. This may not seem to be an issue but any datafile that is writable could be used to exploit a database by crashing it. This feature is an interesting addition.