Securing Change Impact Analyzer

Change Impact Analyzer uses rules files to perform analysis. Rules can be coded in SQL or Java and reside in a local directory. A potential vulnerability exists if the rules files are replaced by files that could have a negative impact on the system or database.

This situation is not unlike any batch file or script that can be run against a database. If these scripts are manipulated, unintended results could occur. Therefore, the Change Impact Analyzer rules files should be secured as you would secure any other potential database-modifying script file.

Change Impact Analyzer does require that the user enter a password to logon to the database. The passwords are not persisted, and are encrypted while they are in memory. However, there is an exception to this in the option to override a default JDBC connection string. A user could specify their own connection string that may contain a hard-coded user ID or password or both.

To alleviate this possible security weakness:

• Placeholders such as <<user ID>> and <<password>> can be used. At runtime, Change Impact Analyzer substitutes the actual logon user ID and password.

• The connection string is encrypted when the system saves it to the cia.properties file.

Oracle recommends that database administrators assign user IDs and passwords that grant read-only access to the database. However in all cases, database administrators need to assign create and write access to the File preprocessor tables and the PeopleCode preprocessor tables.