The Oracle® Hacker's Handbook: Hacking and Defending Oracle

1.4. The Network

Oracle can be configured to listen on TCP sockets, with or without SSL, IPC, SPX, and named pipes. For those who are looking at Oracle on the Windows platform, remember that named pipes are accessible over the network on TCP ports 139 and 445. (This means that even when the TNS Listener has been configured not to listen on TCP sockets, it is still accessible over the network via named pipes.) As far as TCP is concerned, the server is generally found listening on port 1521 or 1526, but it depends on what product has been installed and whether the DBA has configured the server to listen on a non-default port. The Oracle protocol is thoroughly discussed in the next chapter.

1.4.1. Database Objects

Oracle supports the typical database objects one would normally expect in a database server, such as tables and views. Other objects that we'll be paying particular attention to later include triggers, packages, procedures, and functions. You can list all objects types that exist in a database by executing the following SQL:

SQL> select distinct object_type from all_objects order by 1;

In a default install of Oracle 10g, more than 41 object types are listed.

1.4.2. Users and Roles

Oracle requires users to be authenticated with a user ID and password. Oracle is renowned for the number of default accounts it creates with a default password but this has changed in recent times; most default accounts are generally locked these days. We'll look at this further in Chapter 4 ...