RE: Question Re CIS Guidelines (cache freed on Oracle shutdown)

Depending on the OS, when Oracle is shut down, it might be possible to start a program with no particular priviledges and gain access to memory that has not been zeroed out that is no longer allocated with restriction to root or oracle owner access. Your mileage may vary. For a given operating system you can make a controlled test with a program that attaches all free memory (or at least something you know was previously populated) and which intentionally does not zero things out itself and scan through to see if the OS zeroes things for you.  

This is, of course, when Oracle is shut down, as you mentioned in the 6.02 reference line. Being able to look into the Oracle cache areas without oracle user owner or root access should not be possible while Oracle is running, as Tim wrote, or else you've got yourself a whole 'nother world of hurt.  

But for various OS implementations freed cache laying around after Oracle is shut down *may* be an issue of concern.  

Regards,  

mwf  

From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Tim Gorman
Sent: Thursday, October 25, 2007 3:09 AM To: jheinrichdba_at_gmail.com
Cc: oracle-l
Subject: Re: Question Re CIS Guidelines  

Assuming UNIX variants...

Accessing shared memory (where the Oracle SGA resides in UNIX) after database shutdown requires "root" privileges in order to read from "/dev/mem" (or the equivalent on your OS-variant), which is the only way to access regions of memory outside of the APIs provided via the systems calls for shared memory (i.e. shmctl, shmat, etc) or heap/data memory allocation within an image (i.e. brk, sbrk, etc). That's what an API is designed to do
-- provide controlled access to privileged services outside of a privileged
account.

The upshot is that the "root" account must be compromised in order for the quote "Information in caches may be accessed outside of Oracle and beyond the control of the security parameters" to be true. And if that becomes true, then the accessing of memory caches potentially "left behind" by Oracle are the absolute least of your concerns... ;-)

Perhaps the guideline is thinking of some other form of "caching", such as "temporary files" or caching performed into files, not necessarily by the RDBMS? Perhaps by the app-server? Web-server?

Jason Heinrich wrote:

I'm working on implementing the CIS guidelines for Oracle 10g in a database, and I'm a bit confused over one of them:

6.02 Cache -- Cache must be emptied at shut down of Oracle. "Information in caches may be accessed outside of Oracle and beyond the control of the security parameters."

First of all, they don't mention which caches need to be emptied at shutdown
-- I'm assuming the buffer cache and the shared pool. Second, how could
information in the cache be accessed after the instance is shut down? Does the data still exist in memory until overwritten? If so, then I guess someone with the right utility could read those memory addresses and the OS wouldn't prevent them because the addresses no longer belonged to a process?

--

Jason Heinrich
Oracle Developer/DBA

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