Monday, April 22, 2013

Security, Access control on tables - Part 5

Dear Readers,

My name is Franz Devantier, creator of this blog.  I am an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP DBA 11g) Security DBA.  I will be sharing with you the basic duties of an Oracle DBA, and also some of the undocumented, and not so well known tasks. 

I will make a deal with you:  If you refer me to a company that needs database support, from a few hours per week to full time, and I am able to sign a contract with them.
Then I will give you 10% of the monthly contract or deal price every month.  When the contract ends, and we re-sign the contract, I will again give you 10% of the monthly contract price.  This will go on until the company no longer employs or contracts me or my agents to look after their databases.
I can do this, because that 10% is my marketing budget.  When we re-sign the contract, in the future, it may depend on you giving the thumbs up again, and that is worth 10% of the monthly contract price, to be given to you as commission.
Contact: Franz

Security, Access control on tables, views, Synonyms or Rows  -  Part 5
Security Follow-up: Auditing and Prevention
Let’s say that you have carefully designed and implemented security measures, using privileges, views and policies.  However you need to monitor how these measures perform in a live situation.  You can use auditing to notify you of any suspicious or questionable activities.

Once your auditing is working properly, you will be in a position to investigate in depth your defence systems, and judge their relative effectiveness.   You can then strengthen your security measures if appropriate, or loosen up on some other areas that are causing problems with too much security.  You can deal with inappropriate actions that you find on the data, and the consequences of these changes.  You can identify the offenders and take appropriate actions or measures against them.

Auditing can complement your access control in different ways.
-> You can Audit important data to make sure that any changes are recorded, and if suspicious or malicious action is suspected, you have the audit trail or the meta-data to present a case.
-> You can use your auditing as a way of verifying that your access control mechanisms are working the way they were designed to work.
-> You can design audit policies that are designed to only fire when a security breach has been detected.  The other controls that you have in place, should prevent it ever drilling down to this policy, and firing it.  If such a policy does fire, it could mean that your security measures are not working as expected, or that you have had a security breach.  At least with such a policy, you will be alerted to the possibility.

Franz Devantier,
Need a database health check, or a security audit?
devantierf@gmail.com

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