Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog
This is the weblog for Pete Finnigan. Pete works in the area of Oracle security and he specialises in auditing Oracle databases for security issues. This weblog is aimed squarely at those interested in the security of their Oracle databases.
Oracle exec hits out at 'patch' mentality
"Oracle's security chief says the software industry is so riddled with buggy product makers that "you wouldn't get on a plane built by software developers."
Chief Security Officer Mary Ann Davidson has hit out at an industry in which "most software people are not trained to think in terms of safety, security and reliability." Instead, they are wedded to a culture of "patch, patch, patch," at a cost to businesses of $59 billion, she said."
Oracle mending fences with security researchers
"Oracle once marketed its database as "unbreakable," but security researcher David Litchfield has a lesser opinion of the software.
"God forbid that any of our critical national infrastructure runs on this product," he said recently on the widely read Bugtraq security mailing list. "Oops it does.""
Oracle's security chief lambastes faulty coding
"Mary Ann Davidson, chief security officer for database giant Oracle, remembers the first time she heard her company's marketing scheme that advertised its database products as "unbreakable.""
Project Lockdown
This is an excellent paper, truly very very well written. I am a fan of Arups HIPAA book because of its very easy reading style. he has not lost any of the style here. This paper is called "Project Lockdown - A phased approach to securing your database infrastructure" and is a 4 part paper on securing an Oracle database. The paper is phased into 4 sections, what you can do in one day, what you can do in a week, what you can do in a month and finally what you can do in a quarter.
Excellent paper, well worth reading, well done Arup!!!
Exploiting and protecting Oracle
Rationalization, Sex, and Oracle
Tripwire Partners with Oracle® to Enable Enhanced Security and Increased Compliance
"Tripwire Announces Support for Oracle Database Vault
Portland, OR - April 26th, 2006 - Tripwire, Inc.® today announced Tripwire Enterprise will support Oracle® Database Vault to help customers assure security, decrease insider threats and meet today’s stringent regulatory compliance requirements. Together, Tripwire Enterprise and Oracle Database Vault will provide companies complementary controls to help demonstrate to auditors that their change auditing environment is under lock and key."
Pete Finnigan blog back on orablogs
Oracle adds to secure archiving, audit features
"Oracle has begun work on two projects to bolster its database for use in large enterprises, where regulation compliance is critical.
The projects -- Project Data Vault and Project Audit Vault -- aimed to bolster security to ensure compliance, the company said."
Cisco, others invest $6.3m in Guardium
"Cisco Systems Inc is one of a group of investors that have invested $6.3m in database security outfit Guardium Inc."
This investment along with Oracles new product Audit Vault mean that appliance based security in the context of databases is becoming bigger business and more main stream.
Cisco, others invest $6.3m in Guardium
"Cisco Systems Inc is one of a group of investors that have invested $6.3m in database security outfit Guardium Inc."
This investment along with Oracles new product Audit Vault mean that appliance based security in the context of databases is becoming bigger business and more main stream.
Security Patch website
The Patch Impasse: Front line perspectives from enterprise IT
This paper describes a survey of organisations during 2006 to understand the issues facing managers around the problems of whether to patch or not to patch. The paper starts with a profile of the respondents of the survey, it then goes on to talk about the demands of patching, the top concerns relating to patching, organisation concern about un-patched servers, records on patches for audits, downtime of critical servers when patching, high availability of business applications that rely on servers. The conclusion, I will leave you to read but I guess its obvious anyway.
This is an interesting paper for me as it shows what customers of packaged software solutions that do provide security patches think about the issues of patching.
An excellent post by Lucas about object chnages and RSS feeds
Lucas has posted a very interesting paper on the Amis blog titled "Publishing Data Manipulation as an RSS Feed - using Oracle MOD_PLSQL and Flashback" that describes how the Oracle HTTP server, mod_plsql and PL/SQL can be used to generate an RSS feed of changes that have occured in the database.
This is quite an interesting idea and one that sounds quite useful to get the data where it is needed quickly. Having alerts sent straight to a newsreader is a good idea in principle. There are issues of course such as the need to have a HTTP server in the database and the security of the feed itself in terms of data leakage and also potential for alteration.
I talked about a similar subject when i worked at Pentest, that is the useof timestamps to detect changes in database structure. The paper was called "Have your objects been tampered with?"
The hacker resistant database
This is an interesting news article and worth reading for anyone who uses databases.
Site was down due to power failure at the ISP
Password recommendations on Eddies blog
Egor Starostin has a blog
OraSRP open source SQL Trace profile tool
The zip of the python source code is Egor's code but the Windows version is not available just the Linux one. I am not a python programmer but i guess it would not be too difficult to get it running on Windows as well as Linux, some python programmers will no doubt email me and tell me I am wrong!
This looks like a fine body of code and a useful tool, I will have a play when i get some free time...
David Litchfield has a new blog
Oracle refuses to learn its lesson, experts say
"Oracle Corp. may be baking more secure code into its new products, but some experts say that doesn't help enterprises using older programs that are riddled with vulnerabilities."
Oracle Internals: A good post by Doug about DUDE
An Oracle security blog from Oracle
Patched Oracle database still at risk, bughunter says
"Oracle's latest update fails to tackle a database flaw that has already been exploited, a security researcher has warned."
I posted last week a similar news item that talked about the same article on a differnet site. I have posted it again as the above news item includes the links to the explout code.
Customers Wait for Oracle Security Patches
"Just call it Oracle's May critical patch update.
Three weeks after the database server vendor announced the release of its April 2006 CPU, customers are still waiting for the several important fixes."
As i said yesterday, I talked about this very issue in this blog in a post titled "What is amazing is that a lot of CPU patches are not available until May!!" on the 18th of April, it seems like the news guys have just caught on to this issue!
Interesting thoughts on the Andrew Max blog about the recent 0-day view issue
The second post is quite an interesting read and is titled "Too late" and is where Andrew discusses his thoughts about his previous post and also the decision to remove it and to then put it back again!. What I find interesting is the speed of the internet in disseminating information, not just about security bugs and spreading it to the world. He originally quoted Alex's page on the same bug, Alex then updated his page with info from Andrew, Andrew removed his post and then decided he should put it back. Once security bugs get out there it is very difficult to remove them or the information spread by them. The only cure is a patch from Oracle, for which we all have to wait until the next CPU, or could it be longer if you do not happen to be on one of the core platforms where the patches are actually released on the CPU day!.
Oracle keeps many users waiting on April patches
"MAY 02, 2006 (IDG NEWS SERVICE) - Testing problems are forcing some Oracle Corp. users to wait a little longer than usual for the company's latest round of security patches, the first of which were released last month."
This is an interesting article but I did point some of this issue out in my blog on April 18th in a post titled "What is amazing is that a lot of CPU patches are not available until May!!".
Researcher: Oracle Needs To Patch 44 More Bugs
"The bugs range in age from 12 days to two-and-a-half years, says a German security researcher, adding that Oracle plans to fix them, but won't say when.
A German security researcher said this weekend that Oracle products, particularly its flagship database, are vulnerable to 44 bugs, the oldest reported to the Redwood Shores, Calif. developer two-and-a-half years ago, the newest submitted 12 days ago."
Patched Oracle database 'still vulnerable'
"The latest update for Oracle 10g Release 2 does not plug a hole that allows published attack code to run, according to a security researcher
Oracle's latest update fails to tackle a database flaw that has already been exploited, a security researcher has warned."
This report seems to suggests that simply revoking public execute privileges from the vulnerable package will suffice until a patch is available. This will not suffice if the package is avaialble via any other route. This could be because another user or role has execute privileges granted on the package or even if there are no execute privileges granted against the package it can still be vulnerable if it is called from another peice of PL/SQL from the same schema and the arguments are passed into the vulnerable package from the caller.
If access to another user who has the ability to grant the execute privileges back again could also prove to be an issue. If the dictionary accessibility parameter is incorrectly set a user with the EXECUTE ANY PROCEDURE privilege could also execute the package. If access to certain other SYS owned packages are available that allow code to be run as SYS then the exploit could also be used again.
The possibilities are very numerous for exploiting the issue and simply revoking PUBLIC execute privileges is often not enough to protect against vulnerabilities.
The only safe solution is to lobby Oracle to supply a fix.
Patched Oracle database 'still vulnerable'
"The latest update for Oracle 10g Release 2 does not plug a hole that allows published attack code to run, according to a security researcher
Oracle's latest update fails to tackle a database flaw that has already been exploited, a security researcher has warned."
This report seems to suggests that simply revoking public execute privileges from the vulnerable package will suffice until a patch is available. This will not suffice if the package is avaialble via any other route. This could be because another user or role has execute privileges granted on the package or even if there are no execute privileges granted against the package it can still be vulnerable if it is called from another peice of PL/SQL from the same schema and the arguments are passed into the vulnerable package from the caller.
If access to another user who has the ability to grant the execute privileges back again could also prove to be an issue. If the dictionary accessibility parameter is incorrectly set a user with the EXECUTE ANY PROCEDURE privilege could also execute the package. If access to certain other SYS owned packages are available that allow code to be run as SYS then the exploit could also be used again.
The possibilities are very numerous for exploiting the issue and simply revoking PUBLIC execute privileges is often not enough to protect against vulnerabilities.
The only safe solution is to lobby Oracle to supply a fix.