I am looking to learn a little more about Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) and how it works in conjunction with other Oracle Identity Management (OIM) products. For example, what is it's role in Identity/Access Management and how do companies typically utilize it?
You can think of OIA as of an accounts and entitlements warehouse where you'd go to figure out who has access to what, when OIM is more oriented to providing automation in managing (granting and revoking access).
Where I work we utilize it mainly for Identity Audit. It covers prevention and reaction to Segregation of Duties violations. ( For example developers shouldn't have direct, high-privileged access to production environment - that would be a violation ). It's done by designing and executing Identity Audit Policies and Rules against set of employees.
Unfortunately the tool has a lot of deficiencies, so one needs to test it thoroughly before making final decision. Some of them you will be able to solve by writing some small scripts, but some of them are fully on Oracle (scaling, performance, WebUI) so you might want to wait to find out more details about OIG (Oracle Identity Governance suite) that they've announced in Oct'12 ( http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/1859216 )
Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) augments the provisioning, re-certification and privileged access components of OIM by allowing you to run Audit Policies and Role Management.
OIM allows you to define roles to automate and simplify provisioning, but it does not have the role mining capability to suggest roles based on Who has access What already. Therefore in OIM you have to manually define the roles for users. OIA can partially automate the process by looking at the data bottom up to find commonality. Oracle suggest a hybrid approach, a combination of the two.
The audit polices are aimed at Separation of Duties (or toxic combinations) which allow you to prevent access being granted where there is a conflict of interest. A typical example would be the permissions to raise a payment request and permissions to approve a payment request in some software. This is particularly important in highly regulated environments such as banking and the health sector.
In OIM for Privileged Access you would not normally use a SoD constraint for a user to have both a non-privileged and a privileged account. In fact you would want a user to by default use the Standard account and then Step-Up through a break glass process to get their password and use a Privileged Access manager to maintain the audit trail. I am more familiar with CyberArk than the Oracle product included as part of OIM.
Under Oracle Identity Governance 11g PS 2 the licence agreement should give you all the products in the suite. Over time Oracle are further integrating the two products.
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I would need to restrict the deletion of a record for system administrator without using any custom code (like javascript, plugin). Can someone please suggest me the possible approaches for this.
I assume you just want to restrict deleting with no condition to check. There seems no logic in this scenario, why would anybody need this to be implemented that too for System Administrator.
Well if it is your ultimate goal then this could be done with below steps,
Create Workflow on delete trigger.
Create step as "Stop Workflow"
Set Status as "Canceled"
Save and Activate the workflow
You can set the custom Message in step parameter "Status Message". This will be visible while deleting a record.
You can't change the system administrator role out of the box. I would suggest the following approach:
Copy the System Administrator role (e.g. System Manager), but remove delete permissions.
Give users your copied System Manager role.
Remove System Administrator role from all but 1 user.
I'm pretty sure there has to be at least 1 account with system administrator role, but at least this way you can restrict delete permissions.
Seriously the problem is not the delete privilege in System Admin role. It’s the problem with system implementation, and power users who don’t know the real power they possess. First of all, System Admin/Customizer should not be given to end users.
Solution is design another Tool admin role(like James said), Assign it & educate the users. Taking out data governance from tool users & keeping it with Dev team is not a good move. If you have Prod support team, then fine.
Learn what different user base needs in day-to-day work, design well like considering user level privileges (they can delete what they create, etc), make use of Dynamics 365 CRM powerful security concepts, approval or layered process with Tool admins or Prod support, even dashboards for junior users, senior users, Audit reports, identifying tool champions for user training & revisiting the security gaps are key steps here.
Also only Read, Append, AppendTo should be given for Master entities (country, state for example), sometimes user will edit/delete the actual data instead of lookup value.
we have a big distributed and multitenant system with all sorts of accounts :
- admin and backoffice users account
- customer account
- cashier account (tenant : there is one or many more cashier for each client tenant)
All this account are sharing more or less the same lifecycle (account created, grant on some ressources, deny account, password reminder...)
But they are not used in all applications of the system : some account would be used on specific or just two application for example.
Furthermore our system should have the possibility to have a bridge with a CMS for the customer management, or the backoffice users account could be authorized one day against a ldap...
So the question : we are searching for the best way to model our right and authorization service(s).
One idea is to create one service in order to manage all types of accounts of any kind : that is a SOA way to modularize our system
And one idea is to create different services : perhaps much more a micro-service oriented way of thinking...
What are your opinion ? I am searching some advices and feedback on this two different approach or perhaps an alternative that we habve not thought about...
If you are looking for any open-source solution for your problem, you can have a look into keyclaok.
Keycloak also got place in Thoughtworks Technology RADAR.
It is very promising solution and has LDAP, Multi Tenancy support also. checkout keycloak features.
There is paid solution like ForgeRock is also avaible.
Coming to feedback which you have asked about SOA or microservice way of implementation here (You will get different feedback/advice on this)
It will be better if you have a service to take care of access and authorization management and other to look into user details. If you meant that having different services for different account then note that Having one service for taking care account is still considered as Microservice approach as there is one dedicated service to perform single set of tasks.
You can have User-Service for user information management and a authService to handle access and authorization of users. check.
My manager keeps talking about how I will be "developing" an Application Express "security module", however from what she told me we need to have, I don't see what there would be to develop, seeing as Apex already has authorization/groups which allow for various groups of people to see various content.
Is there something that I am missing? What does she mean by a "module", or is it just general wording?
APEX provides several different ways to authenticate users. One approach is to use the "Application Express" authentication scheme and just to create APEX users. Another approach is to use the "Database Account" authentication scheme and to create Oracle users. A third option is to create a custom authentication scheme and to implement your own user management functionality.
Application Express authentication tends to be the easiest to deploy for a small application but tends to get unwieldy over time. It's hard, for example, to give an application administrator the ability to create APEX accounts. You can't tie an APEX account in to a single sign-on solution. It's not easy to integrate with the permission management systems that other applications use. If you're deploying an application in a large company, the last thing the security department needs is one more place where they need to create user accounts, manage privileges, de-activate accounts when someone leaves or changes roles, etc.
Database authentication tends to be more scalable than APEX authentication since Oracle database account provisioning is likely already part of your organization's authentication and authorization infrastructure. On the other hand, that still means that you're creating an Oracle database user for every user you want to create in your application which probably involves a call to a DBA (technically, you could create database users from your application, but most DBAs are going to be concerned about the security implications of that). If you intend to create an internet-facing application with tens of thousands of users, database accounts may get unwieldy.
I'd wager that the vast majority of medium to large-scale APEX applications use a custom authentication scheme. That may involve creating a USER table where you store the username & the hash of the password or a query against an LDAP/ AD repository. That sort of approach provides the most flexibility since you can code whatever you'd like into the authentication system. You can hook into whatever custom authentication/ single sign-on solution the organization happens to use. It probably makes creating new users from within the application much easier (obviously depending on how the authentication system is designed).
My assumption is that your manager is expecting that you'll be writing a custom authentication scheme for your APEX applications.
My team will develop an internal (known users) application that has an architecture based on Java as front-end and PL/SQL as back-end. So, currently we are thinking in a better solution to manage the user/permissions, and we have two options:
Each user has their own database account, granted with the permissions. Currently the legacy system use this approach and I don't like it because it manages permissions based on database objects' granularity. So, I believe it is a bad choice to have a database connection per user. Can you see more cons here?
Build some tables at database to store the users and theirs permissions/profiles and build a PL/SQL procedure to do the login, generating a token and include a parameter to all others PL/SQL to verify this token and then authorize (or not) the execution.
So, you can ask me: why not just manage your permissions in your web-application? Answer: Those PL/SQL are already done and are used by all legacy systems, and this web-application should behave according it (ie. User permissions should be managed by the PL/SQL and its granularity based in please.)
How do you proceed in this case?
I think using the database's built-in mechanism is always to be preferred over rolling our own. And that applies to logging in users as much as anything else.
The biggest single advantage of dedicated user accounts is that we can link a given session with a named user. Well, yes, duh. But the point is, doing thinks like auditing user activity or tracing a performance issue in some process is way more difficult in web applications with generic accounts.
To address your main objection, we don't have to manage database privileges at the user level. That's why we have roles. For normal users, a role will provide sufficient privileges.
So:
define a set of roles which match the various business jobs your application serves.
grant system and object permissions to those roles; remember that roles can be additive (i.e. we can grant privileges on a role to another role).
grant roles to the users.
Find out more.
oracle experts.
My client of mine wants to deploy an application that has to hold credit card numbers in a database. The client is obviously concerned with security.
We are particularly concerend with one painful issue. How can we make sure that only authorized users with a 'business need to know' are allowed to access the data? How can we protect the data from the DBA?
One obvious solution is to encrypt at the application level. We don't want to do that.
An oracle product that came up as a possible solution is Orace TDE (Transparent Data Encryption). It seems to cover the on-disk encryption case well. However, there have been disputing claims if it can be used to hide data from someone with DBA privileges.
I want to be very specific about the use case we're dealing with. We have an up and running application, 24/7/365, that is doing data access constantly. That means that the Oracle wallet is open and data is being decrypted by the database. AT THE SAME TIME a DBA should still be unable to access the data.
I know that Oracle is marketing Oracle Database Vault for this very issue. Given that all I want to do is block DBA access from just one particular table, do I really need the Vault or can I use TDE?
Assistance would be much appreciated,
Or
My guess is that you need Oracle Vault. TDE makes it impossible to read the datafiles but a simple select will still retrieve the data unencrypted.
But ask the dudes or dudettes who made the claim that TDE is sufficient, to explain how to do it without Oracle Vault.
Edit: Two threads on this issue:
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=3249532�
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=3261345�
"there have been disputing claims if it can be used to hide data from someone with DBA privileges."
Probably because there can be conflicting ideas about what constitutes DBA privileges. There is a DBA database role, a SYSDBA privilege and someone who can login as oracle (or Administrator) to the server at the operating system level, each with higher privileges
Privileges can be revoked from the DBA role, so that is even more vague.
VPD can ensure that, for example, the credit-card column is only visible to users logged in from a specific IP (eg the application server), as a certain user or with a certain role.
While a user with DBA role would be able to change the VPD privileges, or grant themselves the appropriate role or impersonate the relevant user, this would show up in the audit log.
i came across a similiar problem with one of our customers. During the evaluation process i have found a possible solution from a german security company. It seems they have developed a system that should prevent the DBA to access any sensitive data. Take a look at their website. It didn´t take a deeper look yet, so i cannot give you further information about this solution.
There are certain alternative companies with DB encryption and access control solutions that implement a strict separation of duties between DBA and Security Admin.
You may want to take a look into D'Amo from a Korean company, Penta Security Systems.
Disclaimer: I have worked as a DB consultant and deployed the solution to many of my customers.