| Oracle® Database Vault Administrator's Guide Oracle9i Release 2 (9.2.0.8) Part Number B32509-01 |
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View PDF |
| Oracle® Database Vault Administrator's Guide Oracle9i Release 2 (9.2.0.8) Part Number B32509-01 |
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View PDF |
This chapter describes how your Oracle Database installation will change after you have installed Oracle Database Vault.
This chapter includes the following topics:
See also Appendix H, "Oracle Database Vault Security Guidelines" for guidelines on managing security in the Oracle Database configuration.
When you install Oracle Database Vault, by default it disables the operating system authentication for accounts that use the SYSDBA privilege. In addition, it disables connections that use the SYSDBA privilege (for example, logging in to the database using AS SYSDBA clause), including those connections using the SYS account. You can reenable the ability to connect to the Oracle Database Vault database with the SYSDBA privilege. See "Enable or Disable SYSDBA Logins" in Oracle Database Vault Installation Guide for instructions on enabling connections with the SYSDBA privilege.
Because of this security feature, the Oracle Database Vault instance may affect the Oracle Real Application Clusters svrctl utility. To resolve this problem, reenable connections that use the SYSDBA privilege, and then use the svrctl utility to manage the environment by using the -c parameter. If you want to avoid specifying account names and passwords in your scripts, use a Secure External Password store configuration using Oracle Wallet Manager or SSL authentication of the Enterprise User Security features of Oracle Database. For more information about these configurations, see Oracle Database Advanced Security Administrator's Guide.
If you use these products in scripts and want to avoid specifying account names and passwords in your scripts, use a Secure External Password store configuration using Oracle Wallet Manager or SSL authentication of the Enterprise User Security features of Oracle Database. For more information about these configurations, see Oracle Database Security Guide, Oracle Database Advanced Security Administrator's Guide, and Oracle Database Enterprise User Security Administrator's Guide.
You should perform a careful analysis of the other processes and programs that normally access your Oracle database instance. Scheduled jobs, batch programs, and other tasks that normally access your database instance may require the addition of the database accounts that are used as logins for the protected Oracle Database Vault realms, or object privileges on the protected objects explicitly granted to these accounts.
When you install Oracle Database Vault, the installation process modifies several database initialization parameter settings to better secure your database configuration. If these changes adversely affect your organizational processes or database maintenance procedures, you can revert to the original settings.
Table 2-1 describes the initialization parameter settings that Oracle Database Vault modifies. Initialization parameters are stored in the init.ora initialization parameter file, located in $ORACLE_HOME/srvm/admin. For more information about this file, see Oracle Database Administrator's Guide.
Table 2-1 Modified Database Initialization Parameter Settings
| Parameter | Default Value in Database | New Value Set by Database Vault | Description |
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Enables or disables the auditing of operations issued by user For more information about |
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Null string |
Specifies a prefix that Oracle uses to authenticate users attempting to connect to the server. The null string value disables For more information about |
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Not configured. |
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Enables or disables the operating system to completely manage the granting and revoking of roles to users. Any previous grants of roles to users using For more information about |
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Specifies whether Oracle checks for a password file. Oracle Database Vault uses password files to authenticate users. The For more information about |
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Enables or disables operating system-authenticated logins only over secure connections, which precludes using Oracle Net and a shared server configuration. When set to For more information about |
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Enables or disables users who are connecting to the database through Oracle Net to have their roles authenticated by the operating system. This includes connections through a shared server configuration, as this connection requires Oracle Net. This restriction is the default because a remote user could impersonate another operating system user over a network connection. For more information about |
During installation of Oracle Database Vault, the installer prompts for several additional database account names. In addition, several database roles are created. These accounts are part of the separation of duties provided by Oracle Database Vault. One common audit problem that has affected several large organizations is the unauthorized creation of new database accounts by a database administrator within a production instance. Upon installation, Oracle Database Vault prevents anyone other than the Oracle Database Vault account manager or a user granted the Oracle Database Vault account manager role from creating users in the database.
Oracle Database Vault uses password file authentication to protect database passwords. This means that the Oracle Database Vault instance uses password files to manage accounts that use the SYSDBA and SYSOPER privileges, such as SYS. You can use the orapwd utility and the REMOTE_LOGIN_PASSWORDFILE initialization parameter setting to update the password files of each instance if the security procedures of your organization mandate periodic password changes.
See also the following sections or documents:
To use orapwd to reenable connections with the SYSDBA privilege, see Chapter 2 of Oracle Database Vault Installation Guide for instructions on enabling connections with the SYSDBA privilege.
For information about creating and maintaining a password file, see Oracle Database Administrator's Guide.
See "Managing SYSDBA Access" for security guidelines for SYSDBA.
See "Managing SYSOPER Access" for security guidelines for SYSOPER.
To meet regulatory, privacy and other compliance requirements, Oracle Database Vault implements the concept of separation of duties. Oracle Database Vault makes clear separation between the account management responsibility, data security responsibility, and database resource management responsibility inside the database. This means that the concept of a superprivileged user (for example, DBA) is divided among several new database roles to ensure no one user has full control over both the data and configuration of the system. Oracle Database Vault prevents the SYS user and other accounts with the DBA role and other system privileges from designated protected areas of the database called realms. It also introduces new database roles called the Oracle Database Vault Owner (DV_OWNER) and the Oracle Database Vault Account Manager (DV_ACCTMGR). These new database roles separate the data security and the account management from the traditional DBA role You should map these roles to distinct security professionals within your organization.
See "Oracle Database Vault Roles" for detailed information about the roles created during the Oracle Database Vault installation. See also "Oracle Database Vault Accounts" for default accounts that are created and for suggestions of additional accounts that you may want to create.
