Research

Update – Based on feedback, I failed to distinguish that I’m referring to normal users running as admin. Sysadmins and domain admins definitely shouldn’t be running with their admin privileges except for when they need them. As you can read in the comments, that’s a huge risk. When I was reviewing Mike’s FireStarter on yanking admin rights from users, it got me thinking on whether admin rights really matter at all. Yes, I realize this is a staple of security dogma, but I think the value of admin rights is completely overblown due to two reasons: There are plenty of bad things an attacker can do in userland without needing admin rights. You can still install malware and access everything the user can. Lack of admin privileges is little more than a speed bump (if even that) for many kinds of memory corruption attacks. Certain buffer overflows and other attacks that directly manipulate memory can get around rights restrictions and run as root, admin, or worse. For example, if you exploit a kernel flaw with a buffer overflow (including flaws in device drivers) you are running in Ring 0 and fully trusted, no matter what privilege level the user was running as. If you read through the vulnerability updates on various platforms (Mac, PC, whatever), there are always a bunch of attacks that still work without admin rights. I’m also completely ignoring privilege escalation attacks, but we all know they tend to get patched at a slower pace than remote exploitation vulnerabilities. This isn’t to say that removal of admin rights is completely useless – it’s very useful to keep users from mucking up your desktop images – but from a defensive standpoint, I don’t think restricting user rights is nearly as effective as is often claimed. My advice? Do not rely on standard user mode as a security defense. It’s useful for locking down users, but has only limited effectiveness for stopping attacks. When you evaluate pulling admin rights, don’t think it will suddenly eliminate the need for other standard endpoint security controls. Share:

During Black Hat last week, David Litchfield disclosed that he had discovered an 0-day in Oracle 11G which allowed him to acquire administrative level credentials. Until today, I was unaware that the attack details were made available as well, meaning anyone can bounce the exploit off your database server to see if it is vulnerable. From the NetworkWorld article, the vulnerability is … … the way Java has been implemented in Oracle 11g Release 2, there’s an overly permissive default grant that makes it possible for a low privileged user to grant himself arbitrary permissions. In a demo of Oracle 11g Enterprise Edition, he showed how to execute commands that led to the user granting himself system privileges to have “complete control over the database.” Litchfield also showed how it’s possible to bypass Oracle Label Security used for managing mandatory access to information at different security levels. As this issue allows for arbitrary escalation of privileges in the database, it’s pretty much a complete compromise. At least Oracle 11G R2 is affected, and I have heard but not confirmed that 10G R2 is as well. This is serious and you will need to take action ASAP, especially for installations that support web applications. And if your web applications are leveraging Oracle’s Java implementation, you may want to take the servers offline until you have implemented the workaround. From what I understand, this is an issue with the Public user having access to the Java services packaged with Oracle. I am guessing that the appropriate workaround is to revoke the Public user permissions granted during the installation process, or lock that account out altogether. There is no patch available at this time, but that should serve as a temporary workaround. Actually, it should be a permanent workaround – after all, you didn’t really leave the ‘Public’ user account enabled on your production server, did you? I have been saying for several years that there is no such thing as public access to your database. Ever! You may have public content, but the public user should not just have its password changed, but should be fully locked out. Use a custom account with specific grant statements. Public execute permission to anything is ill advised, but in some cases can be done safely. Running default ‘Public’ permissions is flat-out irresponsible. You will want to review all other user accounts that have access to Java and ensure that no other accounts have public access – or access provided by default credentials – until a patch is available. Update A couple database assessment vendors were kind enough to contact me with more details on the hack, confirming what I had heard. Application Security Inc. has published more specific information on this attack and on workarounds. They are recommending removing the execute permissions as a satisfactory work-around. That is the most up-to-date information I can find. Share:

My mentors in engineering management used to define their job as managing people, process, and technology. Those three realms, and how they interact, are a handy way to conceptualize organizational management responsibilities. We use process to frame how we want people to behave – trying to promote productivity, foster inter-group cooperation, and minimize mistakes. The people are the important part of the equation, and the process is there to help make them better as a group. How you set up process directly impacts productivity, arranges priority, and creates or reduces friction. Subtle adjustments to process are needed to account for individuals, group dynamics, and project specifics. I got to thinking about this when reading Microsoft’s Simple Implementation of SDL. I commented on some of the things I liked about the process, specifically the beginning steps of (paraphrased): Educate your team on the ground rules. Figure out what you are trying to secure. Commit to gate insecure code. Figure out what’s busted. Sounds simple, and conceptually it is, but in practice this is really hard. The technical analysis of the code is difficult, but implementing the process is a serious challenge. Getting people to change their behavior is hard enough, but with diverging company goals in the mix, it’s nearly impossible. Adding the SDL elements to your development cycle is going to cause some growing pains and probably take years. Even if you agree with all the elements, there are several practical considerations that must be addressed before you adopt the SDL – so you need more than the development team to embrace it. The Definition of Insanity I heard Marcus Ranum give a keynote last year at Source Boston on the Anatomy of The Security Disaster, and one of his basic points was that merely identifying a bad idea rarely adjusts behavior, and when it does it’s generally only because failure is imminent. When initial failure conditions are noticed, as much effort is spent on finger-pointing and “Slaughter of the Innocents” as on learning and adjusting from mistakes. With fundamental process re-engineering, even with a simplified SDL, progress is impossible without wider buy-in and a coordinated effort to adapt the SDL to local circumstances.To hammer this point home, let’s steal a page from Mike Rothman’s pragmatic series, and imagine a quick conversation: CEO to shareholders: “Subsequent to the web site breach we are reacting with any and all efforts to ensure the safety of our customers and continue trouble-free 24×7 operation. We are committed to security … we have hired one of the great young minds in computer security: a talented individual who knows all about web applications and exploits. He’s really good and makes a fine addition to the team! We hired him shortly after he hacked our site.” Project Manager to programmers: “OK guys, let’s all pull together. The clean-up required after the web site hack has set us back a bit, but I know that if we all focus on the job at hand we can get back on track. The site’s back up and most of you have access to source code control again, and our new security expert is on board! We freeze code two weeks from now, so let’s focus on the goal and … Did you see that? The team was screwed before they started. Management’s covered as someone is now responsible for security. And project management and engineering leadership must get back on track, so they begin doing exactly what they did before, but will push for project completion harder than ever. Process adjustments? Education? Testing? Nope. The existing software process is an unending cycle. That unsecured merry-go-round is not going to stop so you can fix it before moving on. As we like to say in software development: we are swapping engines on a running car. Success is optional (and miraculous, when it happens). Break the Process to Fix It The Simplified SDL is great, provided you can actually follow the steps. While I have not employed this particular secure development process yet, I have created similar ones in the past. As a practical matter, to make changes of this scope, I have always had to do one of three things: Recreate the code from scratch under the new process. Old process habits die hard, and the code evaluation sometimes makes it clear a that a retrofit would require more work than a complete rewrite. This makes other executives very nervous, but has been the most efficient path from practical experience. You may not have this option. Branch off the code, with the sub-branch in maintenance while the primary branch lives on under the new process. I halted new feature development until the team had a chance to complete the first review and education steps. Much more work and more programming time (meaning more programmers committed), but better continuity of product availability, and less executive angst. Moved responsibility of the code to an entirely new team trained on security and adhering to the new process. There is a learning curve for engineers to become familiar with the old code, but weaknesses found during review tend to be glaring, and no one’s ego get hurts when you rip the expletive out of it. Also, the new engineers have no investment in the old code, so can be more objective about it. If you don’t break out of the old process and behaviors, you will generally end up with a mixed bag of … stuff. Skills Section As in the first post, I assume the goal of the simplified version of the process is to make this effort more accessible and understandable for programmers. Unfortunately, it’s much tougher than that. As an example, when you interview engineering candidates and discuss their roles, their skill level is immediately obvious. The more seasoned and advanced engineers and managers talk about big picture design and architecture, they talk about tools and process, and they discuss the tradeoffs of their choices. Most newbies are not even aware

I tend to be master of the obvious. Part of that is overcoming my own lack of cranial horsepower (especially when I hang out with serious security rock stars), but another part is the reality that we need someone to remind us of the things we should be doing. Work gets busy, shiny objects beckon, and the simple blocking and tackling falls by the wayside. And it’s the simple stuff that kills us, as evidenced once again by the latest data breach study from TrustWave. Over the past couple months, we’ve written a bunch of times about the need to move to the latest versions of the key software we run. Like browsers and Adobe stuff. Just to refresh your memory: Microsoft IE Issues Reported: Adrian covered the Heise 0-day attack on IE6 and IE7 back in November. Low Hanging Fruit: Endpoint Security: I wrote about the need to keep software updated and patched. Security Strategies for Long Term, Targeted Threats: Rich responded to the APT hysteria with some actionable advice about dealing with the threats, which included moving off IE6. Of course, the news item that got me thinking about reiterating such an obvious concept was that Google is pulling support for IE6 for all their products this year. Google Docs and Google sites loses IE6 support on March 1. Not that you should be making decisions based on what Google is or is not supporting, but if ever there was a good backwards looking indicator, it’s this. So now is the time. To be clear, this isn’t news. The echo chamber will beat me like a dog because who the hell is still using IE6? Especially after our Aurora Borealis escapade. Right, plenty of folks, which brings me back to being master of the obvious. We all know we need to kill IE6, but it’s probably still somewhere in the dark bowels of your organization. You must find it, and you must kill it. Not in the Excuses Business Given that there has been some consistent feedback every time we say to do anything, that it’s too hard, or someone will be upset, or an important application will break, it’s time to man (or woman) up. No more excuses on this one. Running IE6 is just unacceptable at this point. If your application requires IE6, then fix it. If your machines are too frackin’ old to run IE7 or IE8 with decent performance, then get new machines. If you only get to see those remote users once a year to update their machines, bring them in to refresh now. Seriously, it’s clear that IE6 is a lost cause. Google has given up on it, and they won’t be the last. You can be proactive in how you manage your environment, or you can wait until you get pwned. But if you need the catalyst of a breach to get something simple like this done in your environment, then there’s something fundamentally wrong with your security program. But that’s another story for another day. Comment from Rich: As someone who still develops web sites from time to time, it kills me every time I need to add IE6 compatibility code. It’s actually pretty hard to make anything modern work with IE6, and it significantly adds to development costs on more-complex sites. So my vote is also to kill it! Share:

The NSA is going to work with Google to help analyze the recent Chinese (probably) hack. Richard Bejtlich predicted this, and I consider it a very positive development. It’s a recognition that our IT infrastructure is a critical national asset, and that the government can play a role in helping respond to incidents and improve security. That’s how it should be – we don’t expect private businesses to defend themselves from amphibious landings (at least in our territory), and the government has political, technical, and legal resources simply not available to the private sector. Despite some of the more creative TV and film portrayals, the NSA isn’t out to implant microchips in your neck and follow you with black helicopters. They are a signals intelligence collection agency, and we pay them to spy on as much international communication as possible to further our national interests. Think that’s evil? Go join Starfleet – it’s the world we live in. Even though there was some abuse during the Bush years, most of that was either ordered by the President, or non-malicious (yes, I’m sure there was some real abuse, but I bet that was pretty uncommon). I’ve met NSA staff and sometimes worked with plenty of three-letter agency types over the years, and they’re just ordinary folk like the rest of us. I hope we’ll see more of this kind of cooperation. Now the one concern is for you foreigners – the role of the NSA is to spy on you, and Google will have to be careful to avoid potentially uncomfortable questions from foreign businesses and governments. But I suspect they’ll be able to manage the scope and keep things under control. The NSA probably pwned them years ago anyway. Good stuff, and I hope we see more direct government involvement… although we really need a separate agency to handle these due to the conflicting missions of the NSA. Note: for those of you that follow these things, there is clear political maneuvering by the NSA here. They want to own cybersecurity, even though it conflicts with their intel mission. I’d prefer to see another agency hold the defensive reins, but until then I’m happy for any .gov cooperation. Share:

I think I need to stop feeling guilty for trying to run a business. Yesterday we announced that we’re trying to put together a list of end users we can run the occasional short survey past. I actually felt guilty that we will derive some business benefit from it, even though we give away a ton of research and advice for free, and the goal of the surveys isn’t to support marketing, but primary research. I’ve been doing this job too long when I don’t even trust myself anymore, and rip apart my own posts to figure out what the angle is. Jeez – it isn’t like I felt guilty about getting paid to work on an ambulance. It is weird to try to build a business where you maintain objectivity while trying to give as much away for free as possible. I think we’re doing a good job of managing vendor sponsorship, thanks to our Totally Transparent Research process, which allows us to release most white papers for free, without any signup or paywall. We’ve had to turn down a fair few projects to stick with our process, but there are plenty of vendors happy to support good research they can use to help sell their products, without having to bias or control the content. We’re walking a strange line between the traditional analyst model, media sponsorship, research department, and… well, whatever else it is we’re doing. Especially once we finish up and release our paid products. Anyway, I should probably get over it and stop over-thinking things. That’s what Rothman keeps telling me, not that I trust him either. Back to that user panel – we’d like to run the occasional (1-2 times per quarter) short (less than 10 minutes) survey to help feed our research, and as part of supporting the OWASP survey program. We will release all the results for free, and we won’t be selling this list or anything. If you are interested, please email us at survey@securosis.com. End users only (for now) please – we do plan on expanding to vendors later. If you are at a vendor and are responsible for internal security, that’s also good. All results will be kept absolutely anonymous. We’re trying to give back and give away as much as we can, and I have decided I don’t need to feel guilty for asking for a little of your time in exchange. On to the Summary: Webcasts, Podcasts, Outside Writing, and Conferences Adrian’s Dark Reading post on Dealing with Weak Passwords. Rich’s TidBITS article on iPads for the enterprise Rich’s Endpoint DLP article took the cover of Information Security magazine Rich quoted by cnet on the Mac vs. PC security debate At TidBITS, Pepper points out that the dead are staging a comeback in the ebook market. Zombie Authors Threaten Fiction Ebook Market, from the Grave! – Brains, anyone? Favorite Securosis Posts Rich: Adrian’s post on Agile and SDL. Funny timing on this one, with Microsoft starting to release some new information on it. Adrian: Mike’s Monitor Everything. I disagree with some of it, but there is so much good information that it’s my fave this week. David Mortman: Analysis of Trustwave’s 2010 Breach Report More yummy yummy data Mike: What do DLP and condoms have in common? Any time you can mention condoms on a corporate blog, it’s a win. ‘nuf said. Meier: Comments on Microsoft Simplified SDL I was hoping Adrian would do a rundown when I saw this earlier and I enjoyed how he broke it out. Other Securosis Posts The NSA Isn’t Evil (Even Working with Google) Database Security Fundamentals: Access & Authorization Need Brains. User Brains Incite 2/2/2010: The Life of the Party You Have to Buy Data Security Tools Pragmatic Data Security: Discover The Network Forensics (Full Packet Capture) Revival Tour Network Security Fundamentals: Default Deny (UPDATED) Favorite Outside Posts Rich: Jeremiah’s great post on why we need to break the web to secure it. This is one of the biggest problems we face on the web – the refusal to make important changes which would enable us to move forward, for fear of breaking older content. Not that we should break things willy-nilly, but many of the bits we are talking about breaking are easy to work around in terms of still providing users the same browsing experience. It’s the ad networks that are the big problem. Adrian: Krebs on ATM Skimmers, part 1 and 2, as very practical security tips. Mike: Kudos to Will Gragido, who makes a play for the fundamental building block of pragmatic philosophy – Accountability the non-Negotiable Asset. Keep in mind that accountability cuts both ways: you need to be accountable for meeting deliverables and managing expectations, and folks in your organization need to be accountable for not doing stupid things. David Mortman: Excerpts from Randy George’s “Dark Side of DLP” “It’s not just enough to recognize badness; someone has to be able to classify badness, with authority.” Says so much about security and not just DLP. Chris: Twitter: real but malicious BitTorrent trackers harvesting accounts. Who knew Twitter had real security staff? Meier: How secure are you? Access was easy at 9 out of 10 buildings. It’s easy for staff writers at the Orlando Sentinel – it’s easy for anyone. Project Quant Posts Project Quant: DatabaseSecurity – WAF Project Quant: Database Security – Encryption Project Quant: Project Comments Project Quant: Database Security – Protect through Monitoring Project Quant: Database Security – Audit Project Quant: Database Security – Monitoring Project Quant: Database Security – Open Question to Database Security Community Project Quant: Database Security – Shield Top News and Posts House passes cybersecurity bill. This hit right as we were going to press, so we’ll provide analysis later. PGP Acquires TC TrustCenter & Chosen Security. If a PKI falls in the woods, does anyone hear it? David Litchfield hangs up the gloves. David is an exceptional researcher who was a powerful counterbalance to Oracle marketing. Sad to

I spent the last couple hours pouring over the Simplified Implementation of the Microsoft SDL. I started taking notes and making comments, and realized that I have so much to say on the topic it won’t fit in a single post. I have been yanking stuff out of this one and trying to just cover the highlights, but I will have a couple follow-ups as well. But before I jump into the details and point out what I consider are a few weaknesses, let me just say that this is a good outline. In fact, I will go so far as to say that if you perform each of these steps (even half-assed), your applications will more secure. Much more secure, because the average software development shop is not performing these functions. There is a lot to like here but full adoption will be difficult, due to the normal resistance to change of any software development organization. Before I come across as too negative, let’s take a quick look at the outline and what’s good about it. For the sake of argument, let’s agree that the complexity of MS’s full program is the motivation for this simplified implementation of SDL. Lightweight, agile, simple, and modular are common themes for every development tool, platform, and process that enjoys mainstream success. Security should be no different, and let’s say this process variant meets our criteria. Microsoft’s Simplified Implementation of Secure Development Lifecycle (SDL) is a set of companion steps to augment software development processes. From Microsoft’s published notes on the subject, it appears they picked the two most effective security tasks from each phase of software development. The steps are clear, and their recommendations align closely with the web application security research we performed last year. What I like about it: Phased Approach: Their phases map well to most development processes. Using Microsoft’s recommendations, I can improve every step of the development process, and focus each person’s training on the issues they need to account for. Appropriate Guidelines: Microsoft’s recommendations on tools and testing are sound and appropriate for each phase. Education: The single biggest obstacle for most development teams is ignorance of how threats are exploited, and what they are doing wrong. Starting with education covers the biggest problem first. Leaders and Auditors: Appointing someone as ‘Champion’ or leader tasks someone with the responsibility to improve security, and having an auditor should ensure that the steps are being followed effectively. Process Updates and Root Cause Analysis: This is a learning effort. No offense intended, but the first cycle through the process is going to be as awkward as a first date. Odds are you will modify, improve, and streamline everything the second time through. Here’s what needs some work: Institutional Knowledge: In the implementation phase, how do you define what an unsafe function is? Microsoft knows because they have been tracking and classifying attacks on their applications for a long time. They have deep intelligence on the subject. They understand the specifics and the threat classes. You? You have the OWASP top ten threats, but probably less understanding of your code. Maybe you have someone on your team with great training or practical experience. But this process will work better for Microsoft because they understand what sucks about their code and how attackers operate. Your first code analysis will be a mixed bag. Some companies have great engineers who find enough to keep your entire development organization busy for ten years. Others find very little and are dependent on tools to tell them what to fix. Your effectiveness will come with experience and a few lumps on your forehead. Style: When do you document safe vs. unsafe style? Following the point above, your code development team, as part of their education, should have a security style guide. It’s not just what you get taught in the classroom, but proper use of the specific tools and platforms you rely on. New developers come on board all the time, and you need to document so they can learn the specifics of your environment and style. Metrics: What are the metrics to determine accountability and effectiveness? The Simplified Implementation mentions metrics as a way to guide process compliance and retrospective metrics to help gauge what is effective. Metrics are also the way to decide what a risky interface or unsafe function actually is. But the outline only pays lip service to this requirement. Agile: The people who most need this are web developers using Agile methods, and this process does not necessarily map to those methods. I mentioned this earlier. And the parts I could take or leave: Tools: Is the latest tool always the best tool? To simplify their process, Microsoft introduced a couple security oversimplifications that might help or hurt. New versions of linkers & compilers have bugs as well. Threat Surface: Statistically speaking, if you have twice as many objects and twice as many interfaces, you will generally make more mistakes and have errors. I get the theory. In practice, or at least from my experience, threat surface is an overrated concept. I find that the issue is test coverage of the new APIs and functions, which is why you prioritize tests and manual inspection for new code as opposed to older code. Prioritization: Microsoft has a bigger budget than you do. You will need to prioritize what you do, which tools to buy first, and how to roll out tools in production. Some analysis is required on what training and products will be most effective. All in all, a good general guide to improving development process security, and they have reduced the content to a manageable length. This provides a useful structure, but there are some issues regarding how to apply this type of framework to real world programming environments, which I’ll touch on tomorrow. Share:

Trustwave just released their latest breach (and penetration testing) report, and it’s chock full of metrics goodness. Like the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, it’s a summary of information based on their responses to real breaches, with a second section on results from their penetration tests. The breach section is the best part, and I already wrote about one lesson in a quick post on DLP. Here are a few more nuggets that stood out: It took an average of 156 days to detect a breach, and only 9% of victims detected the breach on their own – the rest were discovered by outside groups, including law enforcement and a credit card companies. Chip and PIN was called out for being more resilient against certain kinds of attacks, based on global analysis of breaches. Too bad we won’t get it here in the US anytime soon. One of the biggest sources of breaches was remote access applications for point of sale systems. Usually these are in place for third party support/management, and configured poorly. Memory parsing (scanning memory to pull sensitive information as it’s written to RAM) was a very common attack technique. I find this interesting, since certain versions of memory parsing attacks have virtualization implications… and thus cloud implications. This is something to keep an eye on, and an area I’m researching more. As I mentioned in the post 5 minutes ago, encryption was only used once for exfiltration. Now some suggestions to the SpiderLabs guys: I realize it isn’t politically popular, but it would totally rock if you, Verizon, and other response teams started using a standard base of metrics. You can always add your own stuff on top, but that would really help us perform external analysis across a wider base of data points. If you’re interested, we’d totally be up for playing neutral third party and coordinating and publishing a recommended metrics base. The pen testing section would be a lot more interesting if you released the metrics, as opposed to a “top 10” list of issues found. We don’t know if number 1 was 10x more common than issue 10, or 100x more common. It’s great that we now have another data source, and I consider all these reports mandatory reading, and far more interesting than surveys. Share:

As part of our support for the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), we participate in their survey program which runs quarterly polls on various application security issues. The idea is to survey a group of users to gain a better understanding of how they are managing or perceiving web application security. We also occasionally run our own surveys to support research projects, such as Project Quant. All these results are released free to the public, and if we’re running the survey ourself we also release the raw anonymized data. One of our ongoing problems is getting together a good group of qualified respondents. It’s the toughest part of running any survey. Although we post most of our surveys directly in the blog, we would also like to run some closed surveys so we can maintain consistency over time. We are going to try putting together a survey board of people in end user organizations (we may also add a vendor list later) who are willing to participate in the occasional survey. There would be no marketing to this list, and no more than 1-2 short (10 minutes or less is our target) surveys per quarter. All responses will be kept completely anonymous (we’re trying to set it up to scrub the data as we collect it), and we will return the favor to the community by releasing the results and raw data wherever possible. We’re also working on other ideas to give back to participants – such as access to pre-release research, or maybe even free Q&A emails/calls if you need some advice on something. No marketing. No spin. Free data.* If you are interested please send an email to survey@securosis.com and we’ll start building the list. We will never use any email addresses sent to this project for anything other than these occasional short surveys. Private data will never be shared with any outside organization. We obviously need to hit a certain number of participants to make this meaningful, so please spread the word. *Obviously we get some marketing for ourselves out of publishing data, but hopefully you don’t consider that evil or slimy. Share:

This is part 2 of the Database Security Fundamentals series. In part 1, I provided an overview. Here I will cover basic access and authorization issues. First, the basics: Reset Passwords: Absolutely the first basic step is to change all default passwords. If I need to break into a database, the very first thing I am going to try is to log into a known account with a default password. Simple, fast, and it rarely gets noticed. You would be surprised (okay, maybe not surprised, but definitely disturbed) at how often the default SA password is left in place. Public & Demonstration Accounts: If you are surprised by default passwords, you would be downright shocked by how effectively a skilled attacker can leverage ‘Scott/Tiger’ and similar demonstration accounts to take control of a database. Relatively low levels of permissions can be parlayed into administrative functions, so lock out unused accounts or delete them entirely. Periodically verify that they have not reverted because of a re-install or account reset. Inventory Accounts: Inventory the accounts stored within the database. You should have reset critical DBA accounts, and locked out unneeded ones previously, but re-inventory to ensure you do not miss any. There are always service accounts and, with some database platforms, specific login credentials for add-on modules. Standard accounts created during database installation are commonly subject to exploit, providing access to data and database functions. Keep a list so you can compare over time. Password Strength: There is lively debate about how well strong passwords and password rotation improve security. Keystroke loggers and phishing attacks ignore these security measures. On the other hand, the fact that there are ways around these security precautions doesn’t mean they should be skipped, so my recommendation is to activate some password strength checks for all accounts. Having run penetration tests on databases, I can tell you from first-hand experience that weak passwords are pretty easy to guess; with a little time and an automated login program you can break most in a matter of hours. If I have a few live databases I can divide the password dictionary and run password checks in parallel, with a linear time savings. This is really easy to set up, and a basic implementation takes only a couple minutes. A couple more characters of (required) password length, and a requirement for numbers or special characters, both make guessing substantially more difficult. Authentication Methods: Choose domain authentication or database authentication – whichever works for you. I recommend domain authentication, but the point is to pick one and stick with it. Do not mix the two or later on, confusion and shifting responsibilities will create security gaps – cleaning up those messes is never fun. Do not rely on the underlying operating system for authentication, as that would sacrifice separation of duties, and OS compromise would automatically provide control over the data & database as well. Educate: Educate users on the basics of password selection and data security. Teach them how to pick a word or phase that is easy to remember, such as something they see visually each day, or perhaps something from childhood. Now show them simple substitutions of the letters with special characters and numbers. It makes the whole experience more interesting and less of a bureaucratic annoyance, and will reduce your support calls. All these steps are easy to do. Everything I mentioned you should be able to tackle in an afternoon for one or two critical databases. Once you have accomplished them, the following are slightly more complicated, but offer greater security. Unfortunately this is where most DBAs stop, because they make administration more difficult. Group and Role Review: List out user permissions, roles, and groups to see who has access to what. Ideally review each account to verify users have just enough authorization to do their jobs. This is a great idea, which I always hated. First, it required a few recursive queries to build the list, and second it requires a huge list for non-trivial numbers of users. And actually using the list to remove ‘extraneous’ permissions gets you complaining users, such as receptionists who run reports on behalf of department administrators. Unfortunately, this whole process is time consuming and often unpleasant, but do it anyway. How rigorously you pursue excess rights is up to you, but you should at least identify glaring issues when normal users have access to admin functions. For those of you with the opportunity to work with application developers, this is your opportunity to advise them to keep permission schemes simple. Division of Administrative Duties: If you did not hate me for the previous suggestion, you probably will after this one: Divide up administrative tasks between different admins. Specifically, perform all platform maintenance under an account that cannot access the database and visa-versa. You need to separate the two and this is really not optional. For small shops it seems ridiculous to log out as one user and log back in as another, but negates the domino effect: when one account gets breached it does not mean every system must be considered compromised. If you are feeling really ambitious, or your firm employs multiple DBAs, relational database platforms provide advanced access control provisions to segregate database admin tasks such as archival and schema maintenance, improving security and fraud detection. Share: