Oracle Distributed Systems

Chapter 4. Distributed Database Security

The manager of a distributed database environment has security considerations over and above the typical user authentication and access level concerns of the single database environment. The DBA is responsible for ensuring the privacy and integrity of the data that travels the network and for implementing an appropriately secure user authentication policy. At the same time, any single database in a distributed environment must maintain a high degree of autonomy from the databases and machines with which it interacts. Oracle provides security mechanisms at several layers, including the levels of the database, operating system, and network. This chapter discusses how to implement a secure environment with these various levels and points out some situations that you should avoid.

Privilege Management

You have a variety o f choices for managing access to objects in remote databases; these choices fall into one of the following categories:

The simplistic approach

Remote objects are accessed over a public database link, with a local public synonym for each remote object.

The mirrored account approach

Remote objects are accessed over private database links for all user accounts, with a local public synonym for each remote object.

The local view approach

A local view is created for remote tables. Access to remote objects is via these local objects.

The local wrapper approach

Remote PL/SQL objects (procedures and packages) are called from local procedures; ...