The Database Hacker's Handbook: Defending Database Servers

CHAPTER 1

Why Care About Database Security?

In the introduction, we discussed the reasons why we consider database security to be important. In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of several broad categories of security issues, with a few specific details and some discussion of general defenses. We also briefly discuss how to go about finding security flaws in database systems. Before we do so, we should discuss some emerging trends in database security.

In recent years, with the explosion in web-based commerce and information systems, databases have been drawing ever closer to the network perimeter. This is a necessary consequence of doing business on the Web — you need your customers to have access to your information via your web servers, so your web servers need to have access to your databases. Databases that were previously accessible only via several insulating layers of complex business logic are now directly accessible from the much more fluid — and much less secure — web application environment. The result of this is that the databases are closer to the attackers. With the constant march toward a paperless business environment, database systems are increasingly being used to hold more and more sensitive information, so they present an increasingly valuable target. In recent years, database vendors have been competing with each other to provide the most feature-rich environment they can, with most major systems supporting XML, web services, distributed replication, ...