1 Introducing Oracle Database Vault

What Is Oracle Database Vault?

Oracle Database Vault provides controls for privileged accounts and database configurations. You can use Database Vault in Enterprise Manager. In addition, you can perform privilege analysis.

Topics:

• About Oracle Database Vault

• Controls for Privileged Accounts

• Controls for Database Configuration

• Enterprise Applications Protection Policies

• Run-time Privilege Analysis for Users and Applications

Controls for Privileged Accounts

Privileged database accounts are one of the most commonly used pathways for gaining access to sensitive applications data in the database.

While their broad and unrestricted access facilitates database maintenance, the same access also creates a point of attack for gaining access to large amounts of data. Oracle Database Vault realms around application schemas, sensitive tables, and stored procedures provide controls to prevent privileged accounts from being exploited by intruders and insiders to access sensitive application data.

Figure 1-1 Oracle Database Vault Realm Blocking DBA Access to Data

Description of "Figure 1-1 Oracle Database Vault Realm Blocking DBA Access to Data"

What Privileges Do You Need to Use Oracle Database Vault?

Oracle Database Vault provides a set of database roles that enable different users to perform specific tasks, based on separation-of-duty guidelines.

The most commonly used roles are as follows:

• DV_OWNER and DV_ADMIN enable you to create and manage Database Vault policies.

• DV_ACCTMGR enables you to manage user accounts.

When you register Oracle Database Vault, the DV_OWNER role is granted to a user who is created during the process, and the DV_ACCTMGR role is granted to a second, optional user. You can grant the Database Vault roles to other users, but ensure that these users are trusted.

Components of Oracle Database Vault

Oracle Database Vault has a set of components that include PL/SQL packages and other special tools.

Topics:

• Oracle Database Vault Access Control Components

• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Database Vault Administrator Pages

• Oracle Database Vault DVSYS and DVF Schemas

• Oracle Database Vault PL/SQL Interfaces and Packages

• Oracle Database Vault Reporting and Monitoring Tools

How Oracle Database Vault Addresses Compliance Regulations

One of the biggest side benefits resulting from regulatory compliance has been security awareness.

Historically, the focus of the information technology (IT) department has been on high availability and performance. The focus on regulatory compliance has required everyone to take a step back and look at their IT infrastructure, databases, and applications from a security angle. Common questions include:

• Who has access to this information?

• Where is the sensitive information stored?

Regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards: a Revised Framework (Basel II), Japan Privacy Law, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), and the European Union Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications have common themes that include internal controls, separation of duty, and access control.

While most changes required by regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA are procedural in nature, the remainder may require technology investments. A common security requirement found in regulations is stringent internal controls. The degree to which Oracle Database Vault helps an organization achieve compliance varies with the regulation. In general, Oracle Database Vault realms, command rules, factors and separation of duty features, help reduce the overall security risks that regulation provisions worldwide address.

Table 1-1 lists regulations that address potential security threats.

How Oracle Database Vault Protects Privileged User Accounts

Most recent security breaches have revealed that intruders, whether coming from inside or from outside an organization, are increasingly targeting privileged users database accounts to compromise them and use them to steal data from databases.

Oracle Database Vault protects against compromised privilege user account attacks by using realms, factors, and command rules. Combined, these provide powerful security tools to help secure access to databases, applications, and sensitive information. You can combine rules and factors to control the conditions under which commands in the database are allowed to execute, and to control access to data protected by a realm. For example, you can create rules and factors to control access to data based on IP addresses, the time of day, and specific programs. These can limit access to only those connections that pass these conditions. This can prevent unauthorized access to application data and access to the database by unauthorized applications.

Oracle Database Vault provides built-in factors that you can use in combination with rules to control access to the database, realm-protected applications, and commands within the database.

You can associate rules and factors with many SQL statements in the database to provide stronger internal controls within the database. You can customize these to meet the operational policies for your site. For example, you could define a rule to limit execution of the ALTER SYSTEM statement to a specific IP address and host name.

How Oracle Database Vault Allows for Flexible Security Policies

Oracle Database Vault helps you design flexible security policies for your database.

For example, any database user, such as SYSTEM, who has the DBA role, can make modifications to basic parameters in a database. Suppose an inexperienced administrator who has system privileges decides to start a new redo log file but does not realize that doing so at a particular time may cause problems for the database. With Oracle Database Vault, you can create a command rule to prevent this user from making such modifications by limiting his or her usage of the ALTER SYSTEM SWITCH LOGFILE statement. Furthermore, you can attach rule sets to the command rule to restrict activity further, such as limiting the statement's execution in the following ways:

• By time (for example, only during 4 p.m. and 5 p.m. on Friday afternoons)

• By local access only, that is, not remotely

• By IP address (for example, allowing the action to only a specified range of IP addresses)

You can customize Oracle Database Vault separation of duties to fit the requirements of business of any size. For example, large customers with dedicated IT staff and some out sourced back end operations can further fine tune separation of duties to control what out sourced database administrators can do. For smaller organizations with some users handling multiple responsibilities, separation of duties can be tuned down and these users can create separate dedicated accounts for each responsibility. This helps such users keep track of all actions made and prevents intruders from exploiting compromised privileged database accounts to steal sensitive data. In addition, it helps auditors verify compliance.

How Oracle Database Vault Addresses Database Consolidation Concerns

Consolidation and cloud environments reduce cost but potentially expose large amounts of sensitive application data to those without a true need-to-know.

Data from one country may be hosted in an entirely different country, but access to that data must be restricted based on regulations of the country to which the data belongs. Oracle Database Vault controls provide increased security for these environments by preventing database administrators from accessing the applications data. In addition, controls can be used to help block application bypass and enforce a trusted-path from the application tier to the application data.

Oracle Database Vault provides three distinct separation of duty controls out-of-the-box for security administration, account management, and day-to-day database administration activities. Oracle Database Vault separation of duty controls can be customized and organizations with limited resources can assign multiple Oracle Database Vault responsibilities to the same administrator.

Oracle customers today still have hundreds and even thousands of databases distributed throughout the enterprise and around the world. However, for database consolidation as a cost-saving strategy in the coming years to be effective, the physical security provided by the distributed database architecture must be available in the consolidated environment. Oracle Database Vault addresses the primary security concerns of database consolidation.

Figure 1-2 illustrates how Oracle Database Vault addresses the following database security concerns:

• Administrative privileged account access to application data: In this case, Oracle Database Vault prevents the database administrator from accessing the schemas that are protected by the Finance realm. Although the database administrator is the most powerful and trusted user, this administrator does not need access to application data residing within the database.

• Separation of duties for application data access: In this case, the HR realm owner, created in Oracle Database Vault, has access to the HR realm schemas.

Figure 1-2 Oracle Database Vault Security

Description of "Figure 1-2 Oracle Database Vault Security"

Database consolidation can result in multiple powerful user accounts residing in a single database. This means that in addition to the overall database administrator, individual application schema owners also may have powerful privileges. Revoking some privileges may adversely affect existing applications. Using Oracle Database Vault realms, you can enforce access to applications through a trusted path, preventing database users who have not been specifically authorized access from using powerful privileges to look at other application data. For example, a database administrator who has the SELECT ANY TABLE system privilege can be prevented from using that privilege to view other application data residing in the same database.

How Oracle Database Vault Works in a Multitenant Environment

Oracle Database Vault can be used with Oracle Multitenant to provide increased security for consolidation.

It can prevent privileged user access inside a pluggable database (PDB) and between the PDB and the common privileged user at the container database. Each pluggable database (PDB) has its own Database Vault metadata, such as realms, rule sets, command rules, default policies (such as default realms) and so on. In addition, the objects within the DVSYS and DVF schemas are automatically available to any child PDBs. Both of these schemas are common user schemas.

Because Oracle Database Vault policies are scoped to individual PDBs, you can create individual policies for each PDB. When you use Database Vault to protect an object, Database Vault subjects common privileges for common objects to the same enforcement rules as local system privileges.

When you configure a PDB that has Database Vault enabled, the DVSYS schema is a common user schema that is stored in the root. This means that all the objects within the DVSYS schema (tables, data dictionary views, user accounts, PL/SQL packages, default policies, and so on) are subject to the common privileges available for this schema. In other words, you can create realms, factors, and so on in the root to protect the schema in the root. Ensure that you configure Database Vault in the root first, before you configure it in the associated PDBs.

Figure 1-3 illustrates how Database Vault protection applies to both common and local users. In this scenario, neither the common user nor the local users have access to the realms in PDB1 and PDB2. Both the common user and the PDB3 local user have access to the CRM application in PDB3, where Database Vault is not enabled.

Figure 1-3 Oracle Database Vault in a Multitenant Environment

Description of "Figure 1-3 Oracle Database Vault in a Multitenant Environment"