Preface

This book covers most of the Oracle Database 12c Security features and solutions that exist in Oracle Database 12c. Oracle Database 12c Security Cookbook will help you better understand database security challenges. It will guide you through the process of implementing appropriate security mechanisms, helping you to ensure that you are taking proactive steps to keep your data safe. Because the book features solutions for common security problems in the new Oracle Database 12c, it will make you confident about securing your database from a range of different threats and problems.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Basic Database Security, introduces you to the different authentication methods supported by Oracle Database 12c and also provides a brief overview about creating and using database roles.

Chapter 2, Security Considerations in Multitenant Environment, focuses on some of the security considerations concerning common and local: users, roles, and privileges.

Chapter 3, PL/SQL Security, helps you understand the differences and usages of definer and invoker rights procedures as well as usages of code-based access control. It gives required information about authorization.

Chapter 4, Virtual Private Database, introduces you to the Oracle Virtual Private Database, which is a security feature introduced in Oracle Database 8i, which enables you to have a more granular control over security of your data.

Chapter 5, Data Redaction, introduces you to the new security feature Oracle Data Redaction, which helps you mask (hide/redact) some (sensitive) data from end users in a production environment.

Chapter 6, Transparent Sensitive Data Protection, teaches you ways to create classes of sensitive data and helps you gain more centralized control over how sensitive data is protected.

Chapter 7, Privilege Analysis, it shows how to create and enable privilege analysis policies. It also covers how to generate reports and revoke both used and unused Object/System privileges.

Chapter 8, Transparent Data Encryption, explains key concepts and tasks such as: two-key architecture, key management, message authentication code (MAC), salt, encrypting columns in a table, encrypting a tablespace, creating an encrypted RMAN backup, and so on.

Chapter 9, Database Vault, covers basic concepts of Oracle Database Vault. It teaches you how to create and appropriately use realms, rules, rule sets, command rules, factors, and secure application roles.

Chapter 10, Unified Auditing, introduces a new auditing architecture.

Chapter 11, Additional Topics, covers more advanced topics and teaches you how to perform everyday administration tasks in Database Vault environment.

Chapter 12, Appendix - Application Contexts, will cover how to retrieve values from built-in contexts and to create, set, and use an application context.

What you need for this book

Software required (with version)- Oracle Database 12c, Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c R4, Oracle Enterprise Manager Database Express 12c

Hardware specifications- OS required- Linux (Preferred Oracle Linux 6.5)

Who this book is for

This book is for DBAs, developers, and architects who are keen to know more about security in Oracle Database 12c. This book is best suited for beginners and intermediate-level database security practitioners. Basic knowledge of Oracle Database is expected, but no prior experience of securing a database is required.

Sections

In this book, you will find several headings that appear frequently (Getting ready, How to do it, How it works, There's more, and See also).

To give clear instructions on how to complete a recipe, we use these sections as follows:

Getting ready

This section tells you what to expect in the recipe and describes how to set up any software or any preliminary settings required for the recipe.

How to do it…

This section contains the steps required to follow the recipe.

How it works…

This section usually consists of a detailed explanation of what happened in the previous section.

There's more…

This section consists of additional information about the recipe in order to make the reader more knowledgeable about the recipe.

See also

This section provides helpful links to other useful information for the recipe.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Create a local user (for example, mike)."

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

c##zoran@CDB1> create user c##maja identified by oracle1
 container=all; 

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Click on the Create button."

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

For this book we have outlined the shortcuts for the Mac OX platform if you are using the Windows version you can find the relevant shortcuts on the WebStorm help page https://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/help/keyboard-shortcuts-by-category.html.

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