Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I saw Laurent Schneider's post yesterday titled "RECOVERY_CATALOG_OWNER" and read it with interest. I have been looking at a similar subject myself recently, the problem of limiting PUBLIC privileges. More later when i am ready to write up some results..:-). I saw that Laurent has revoked some privileges from a built in role, the RECOVERY_CATALOG_OWNER role. He was lucky and can do still what he needed. There are a couple of comments I would make about this. First don't revoke privileges from built in roles. Create your own role with the restricted privileges and then grant that to your users. Oracle has in the past granted too many privileges, or rather more than are needed for the job at hand. So revoking some can be done without issue BUT its hit and miss. If you revoke a privilege then check what objects have become invalid and who owns them, then grant back the relevant privileges. The whole area of limiting privileges from built in functions is haphazard and can cause issues if you do it. More later on this as its a big problem area for me..... Especially PUBLIC!