Security-Related Issues

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the security principles of least privilege and defense in depth. You looked at various ways of mapping an application end user to a database user for authentication purposes and each method’s pros and cons. You examined proxy authentication (a JDBC OCI driver feature as of Oracle 10g Release 1 also known as n-tier authentication) in detail, and you learned how this technique can elegantly solve the problems of authentication and password management for a web application. The proxy authentication feature allows the middle tier to authenticate itself to the database on behalf of an end user database account without supplying the end user database account’s password. You also learned how auditing captures the end user identity as well as the proxy user identity.