Release 5.3
F23657-01
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Security Guide
Release 5.3
F23657-01
October 2019
This guide describes essential security management options for Oracle Thesaurus Management System (TMS) Release 5.3.
This security guide provides guidelines and recommendations for installing, configuring, and monitoring Oracle TMS to make them more secure in customer environments. This is a practical guide for technical users, installers, and system administrators who implement and maintain the Oracle TMS system. This document discusses guidelines for hardening of the Oracle TMS security application, and other system hardening configuration recommendations.
This document cannot address every security scenario that might be applicable to a particular implementation and environment; however, it provides basic recommendations for securing Oracle TMS. Oracle recommends that you fully test the security setup in a non-production environment to ensure proper functionality and integrity before you install the software.
This guide will help you ensure that Oracle TMS and the various components involved in the setup are properly secured. Oracle recommends that you secure the Oracle TMS environment in alignment with your company's enterprise security policies.
This guide is not intended to replace the Oracle TMS technical documentation (Installation Guide and User's Guide) delivered with the product. It provides references to relevant information in Installation and User's Guides. Readers of this guide should have a good understanding of Oracle TMS. Implementing Oracle TMS security requires an in-depth understanding of many disciplines, including WebLogic Server administration, Oracle Database security administration, and network security administration.
This guide presents the following security guidelines and recommendations:
In addition, see the following documents for security configuration instructions:
Oracle Fusion Middleware Understanding Security for Oracle WebLogic Server
Oracle Fusion Middleware Securing Oracle WebLogic Server
Oracle Fusion Middleware Information Roadmap for Oracle WebLogic Server
Oracle Application Server Web Services Security Guide
This section provides general security recommendations for securing any application.
The most critical resource to protect is the Oracle TMS database, which contains information that is both sensitive and critical to the performance of your business. Oracle recommends that you protect most of your computing resources from unauthorized access, manipulation, or destruction from both internal and external parties.
For Web enablement, you must protect resources from unauthorized access via the Internet. In addition, access to highly confidential data or strategic resources should be available to only a few trusted users or system administrators.
Oracle recommends that you install a firewall between the database and application servers. In addition, if you are using Web Tier, consider placing a firewall between the Oracle HTTP Server (OHS) and the WebLogic Server. The firewalls provide assurance that access to these systems is restricted to a known network route, which can be monitored and restricted, if necessary. As an alternative, a firewall router substitutes for multiple, independent firewalls.
One of the main requirements of system security is monitoring. Auditing and reviewing audit records address this requirement. Each component within a system has some degree of monitoring capability. Oracle recommends that you establish a policy to check and monitor activities in your system regularly. Refer to the database and application server documentation for audit functionality.
Oracle recommends that you establish a policy to set up a change management process to keep track of all the changes in your software systems. All changes to software should be approved and audited.
It is good practice to change both system account passwords and user passwords periodically. Follow your organization's operating procedures for the frequency of making changes.
All users should change their passwords when they log in for the first time.
Tell users never to share passwords, write down passwords, or store passwords in files on their computers.
Encourage users to choose password-reset questions and answers that are easy for them to remember, but difficult for someone else to guess.
In the Oracle database, a profile is a named set of resource limits and password parameters that restrict database usage and instance resources for a user. By default, every Oracle TMS user is assigned the DEFAULT profile. You can change its limitations on resources or password use or assign a separate profile to each user or user role. Each user can have only one profile. For more information, see the Oracle Thesaurus Management System Installation Guide and the Oracle Database Security Guide.
Keep only the minimum number of ports open. You should close all ports not in use.
To ensure security in the Oracle TMS application, carefully configure all components, including the following third-party components:
Web browsers
Firewalls
Load balancers
Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)
For more information, see the documentation for the application you are configuring.
This section provides information for securely installing and configuring the Oracle TMS application, including but not limited to configuring firewall settings, installing signed certificates when using HTTPS, and closing unused ports.
To ensure that your installation includes up-to-date security fixes, install the latest Oracle CPUs and critical patch set.
For more information, see the Oracle Thesaurus Management System Installation Guide.
Information sent over the network and across the Internet in clear text may be intercepted. Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and its successor Transport Layer Security (TLS) are features that provide encryption of network traffic between the browser and the Oracle TMS web server.
For more information, see the Oracle Thesaurus Management System Installation Guide.
To support HTTPS for Oracle TMS, you need to request a signed certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA) vendor such as Thawte or Verisign, and then import the signed certificate into the Oracle Wallet for the Oracle Application Server.
For more information, see the Oracle Thesaurus Management System Installation Guide.
The Oracle TMS application does not use the following services or information for any functionality:
Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). This protocol is an Internet standard for e-mail transmission across Internet Protocol (IP) networks.
Identification Protocol (identd). This protocol is generally used to identify the owner of a TCP connection on UNIX.
Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP). This protocol is one method for managing and reporting information about different systems.
Therefore, restricting these services or information will not affect those Oracle applications. If you are not using these services for other applications, Oracle recommends that you disable these services to minimize your security exposure.
If you need SMTP, identd, or SNMP for other applications, be sure to upgrade to the latest version of the protocol to provide the most up-to-date security for your system.
In addition, Oracle recommends that you remove unused Oracle TMS user accounts if you are upgrading from earlier releases.
Web applications issue HTTP error messages, such as Error Code 500 (Internal Server Error) and Error Code 404 (Not Found), for servlet exceptions that occur at run time (for example, when a servlet is processing the form data). Some internal error messages are verbose and provide sensitive system information.
To tighten the security on your production systems, Oracle recommends that you replace the verbose error messages with brief customized messages.
You can create an HTML error page containing a custom message, and then use the XML error-page element and subelements in the web.xml file to specify the HTML error page to use for the servlet exceptions. You can create a different error message for each error number or use the same generic message for more than one error.
Oracle recommends that you edit the web.xml file for the Oracle TMS application.
For information on securing the WebLogic Server, see:
Oracle Fusion Middleware Securing Oracle WebLogic Server
Oracle Fusion Middleware Securing a Production Environment for Oracle WebLogic Server
"Security" in Oracle Fusion Middleware Information Roadmap for Oracle WebLogic Server
You can use the XML session-tracking element to provide security for the TMS Lite Browser session-tracking cookies.
In the orion-web.xml file, you can configure the following flags (attributes) for the session-tracking element:
set-secure — Requests that your Internet browser only honor the HTTPS protocol to access Web sites. If you set the secure flag to true, users must enter https:// to access Web sites. Entering http:// will not work.
HttpOnly — Requests that your Internet browser honor only the HTTP and HTTPS protocols to access Web sites. Other protocols, such as FTP, will not work.
Note:
If you configure the secure and HttpOnly flags for session-tracking cookies, you must make the changes on all servers in a load-balanced environment.Once you complete the above changes, access to the application using HTTP will not work. Users will be forced to use HTTPS only.
Although the importance of passwords is well known, the following basic rule of security management is worth repeating:
Ensure all your passwords are strong passwords.
You can strengthen passwords by creating and using password policies for your organization.
You should modify the following passwords to use your policy-compliant strings:
Passwords for the database default accounts, such as SYS and SYSTEM.
Passwords for the database application-specific schema accounts, such as RXC, OPA, and RXC_PD. You can run the Set Password (set_pwd) utility to set stronger passwords for the default Oracle TMS schemas. For details on using the utility, refer to the Oracle Thesaurus Management System Installation Guide.
Password for the database listener. If you do not configure the database listener to require an authorization password, you unnecessarily expose the underlying database service names to unauthorized individuals.
For guidelines on securing passwords and for additional ways to protect passwords, refer to the Oracle Database Security Guide specific to the database release you are using.
By default, the current version of Oracle Forms is displayed when someone accesses a forms servlet URL. This is because the form parameter in formsweb.cfg calls test.fmx, which displays the version number so that you can check the version you are running.
To change this behavior:
Create a new file based on test.fmx that does not display the version number.
In formsweb.cfg, default section, set form=your_new_file.
This section includes:
See My Oracle Support note Secure the Showjobs Web Command in a Non Secured Reports Server in Oracle Reports 11g, ID 1242614.1.
This section provides information for securing the TMS application, users, and data.
In TMS, database roles dictate which windows in the user interface a user can access. For users assigned to one or more Data Access Groups (DAGs), their assignments dictate the data they see in TMS windows and in the HTML Browser, and whether or not they can operate on TMS data in specific dictionaries and/or domains. You define DAGs in the Maintain DAGs window and then assign users to the group either in the User Assignments tab of the Maintain DAGs window or as you create user accounts. For more information, see the Oracle Thesaurus Management System User's Guide.
Each password should meet or exceed the minimum requirements for the application. For example, a password may need to:
Contain a minimum of eight characters.
Contain at least one upper case character, and one alphanumeric character.
For more information, see the documentation for the application you are configuring.
Oracle enables a database administrator to enforce various rules about passwords at the database level, including setting a password lifetime, after which users must set a new password; disallowing reuse of previous passwords; locking an account after a user attempts to log on a specified number of times; and creating complexity rules for passwords through a PL/SQL function. For more information, see the Oracle Thesaurus Management System Installation Guide.
TMS includes predefined roles that you can assign to users. A predefined role determines the functions and menu options that are available to a user. You can enforce security by assigning users only the database roles they need to do their work, preventing them from seeing other parts of the system and taking actions they are not authorized to take.
You can also create custom database roles, which may be required if the database roles that are supplied as part of the installation do not fit or cannot be modified to fit your business model.
For more information, see the Oracle Thesaurus Management System User's Guide.
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Oracle Thesaurus Management System Security Guide, Release 5.3
F23657-01
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