Re: Userid's/Passwords and Application Development

"Pete's" <empete2000_at_yahoo.com> wrote in message news:6724a51f.0307140444.440bd634_at_posting.google.com...
> Just a couple notes on what I've observed here.
>
> First, I don't appreciate the flames happening from what I posted.
> Second, I'm not their manager. Third, I was a developer before being
> a DBA. Four, I'm trying to gather information and support to try to
> change this behavior. Five, Management has known and seems to condone
> this behavior. Six, I'm asking because I know I could hack the
> databases here. Heck, I've been at this company for just over two
> years and I just found out that there's an Oracle DB implemented out
> the field being tended to by users, well guess what, I hacked it right
> off the back, too me maybe 2 seconds.
>
> I thought I'd ask what I did to try get a concensus of what I'm trying
> to change the DB security to is how others in this industry handle
> their DB security.
>
> Disgusted,
> Pete's
>

Well, I'm not flaming; I sympathise. And from a non-secure setup due to poor developers (usually third party apps in our case), it's usually a long haul to tighten the ratchet one notch at a time to get the security reasonable. This is because developers of third party apps usually deliver systems which connect as app owner, have app owner as DBA, grant DBA to public and create public synonyms for everything. Why? Because they cannot be bothered with security, and the demos work with that arrangement.

After a long tug of war, eventually we arrive at a scenario where:

1. Developers have complete control of a DEV environment - as they must; or we are hindering them from doing their job.
2. Other environments; system test, acceptance test, performance test, business readiness test, final preproduction test, production, etc, etc, are subject to change control, and the DBA implements the changes.

These days, with three tier applications, people don't authenticate themselves to Oracle. They connect to an application server, which connects to the database.

The application server should NOT connect as schema owner. We should create an APP_USER role, or whatever, with appropriate privileges, which the application will use to connect.

Furthermore (and sadly), we need to take some kind of precautions to attempt to prevent the application server username/password from being used to connect from terminals other than the app server itself. This is not a satisfactory situation, but I can't think of better.

Regards,
Paul Received on Mon Jul 14 2003 - 15:13:50 CDT