RE: How do you meet your audit requirement?

From: William Wagman <wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu>
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 2008 10:49:43 -0700
Message-ID: <FE043305B38A0F448F3924429D650C2A082A23C5@VEXBE2.ex.ad3.ucdavis.edu>

Greetings,

I did find three notes on Metalink addressing this problem, 1019377.6, 72460.1 & 166301.1 with somewhat indefinite answers. I opened an SR and this is the answer I received from Oracle.

You are correct there is a patch being worked on but until that patch is released Oracle does not officially support moving the aud$ table into a tablespace other than system. It does seem a little contradicting and I do apologize for that, when the patch is released then you would be able to move the table and still get support on it. As for the other note 1019377.6 it does state as a disclaimer at the bottom of the note that this is for educational purposes only and is not supported by Oracle. As a recap Oracle does not support moving the aud$ table into a tablespace other than system. Oracle suggests to wait for the patch.

Thanks.

Bill Wagman
Univ. of California at Davis
IET Campus Data Center
wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu
(530) 754-6208
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of William Wagman Sent: Friday, June 27, 2008 4:35 PM
To: Andrew Kerber
Cc: Stefan Knecht; oracle-l
Subject: RE: How do you meet your audit requirement?

Andrew,

Thanks for the info. The question arose because at one point I was told that Oracle didn't support that. Several folks suggested opening an SR and asking them directly. I will do that and report back.

Thanks.

Bill Wagman
Univ. of California at Davis
IET Campus Data Center
wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu
(530) 754-6208
From: Andrew Kerber [mailto:andrew.kerber_at_gmail.com] Sent: Friday, June 27, 2008 4:30 PM
To: William Wagman
Cc: Stefan Knecht; oracle-l
Subject: Re: How do you meet your audit requirement?

Oracle recommends doing an alter table move on the aud$ table to a non-system tablespace.  That recommendation has been around for some time (at least 3 years).  You don't need to rename it or anything. On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 6:10 PM, William Wagman <wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu> wrote: Stefan,
 

I will open an SR and post the results.
 

Thanks.
 

Bill Wagman
Univ. of California at Davis
IET Campus Data Center
wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu
(530) 754-6208
From: Stefan Knecht [mailto:knecht.stefan_at_gmail.com] Sent: Friday, June 27, 2008 12:23 AM
To: William Wagman
Cc: oracle-l
Subject: Re: How do you meet your audit requirement?
 

Oracle Support has officially called this a "grey zone" -- Oracle development won't officially label it supported, but Oracle Support does, and stated so in several SRs.

Just open a quick SR for your own CSI, so you have the statement officially in case things get hairy. And the worst that could happen is when you're running into a BUG that's related to that table, they might ask you to move it back to SYSTEM temporarily to see if the issue still occurs.

AUD$ isn't one of the truly internal tables that are protected by bootstrap$ -- technically, only those are very hard to toy with, most of the others are just plain tables.

As a side note, if you're installing Database Vault (or, more precisely, Label Security) aud$ gets moved to SYSTEM user, and SYS only gets a public synonym. And if you can even put the table in another schema, there's surely nothing technical that would prevent you from putting it into a different tablespace.

Cheers

Stefan
On Fri, Jun 27, 2008 at 2:00 AM, William Wagman <wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu> wrote: Greetings,
 

This brings up another somewhat related question. In a book on Oracle Security the suggestion was made to put the aud$ table in a separate tablespace as follows...
 

1)      Create a new tablespace;
2)      Create table audit_temp tablespace <new tablespace> as select * from sys.aud$;
3)      Drop table sys.aud$;
4)      Rename audit_temp to aud$

 

This would keep the sys.aud$ table from causing the system tablespace to grow inordinately large. Upon mentioning to another person that I was using this technique I was told that it is not a good idea and that Oracle does not support the practice of rebuilding sys tables. That makes good sense to me. The question then is how does one keep the aud$ table from making the system tablespace really huge?
 

Thanks.
 

Bill Wagman
Univ. of California at Davis
IET Campus Data Center
wjwagman_at_ucdavis.edu
(530) 754-6208
From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [mailto:oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Jared Still Sent: Thursday, June 26, 2008 2:08 PM
To: ltiu_at_alumni.sfu.ca
Cc: oracle-l_at_freelists.org
Subject: Re: How do you meet your audit requirement?
 
 

On Thu, Jun 26, 2008 at 11:29 AM, Lyndon Tiu <ltiu_at_alumni.sfu.ca> wrote: We use:

1. sys.aud$
2. Each table has a last_updated_date and a last_updated_by column. It gets updated by a trigger:

CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER TABLE.LAST_UPDATE_TRG before insert or update on
...
 

Those measures only work for accounts that don't have the access to change the audit data.

Quite a number of DBA's have that access.

This method may meet audit requirements, but it will not prevent someone with admin privileges from stealing data, and covering his tracks in the process.

I imagine this story could be repeated in a  number of companies.

That trigger for instance could easily be modified to:

CREATE OR REPLACE TRIGGER TABLE.LAST_UPDATE_TRG before insert or update on
TABLE
for each row
begin
  if user = 'SCOTT' then null;
  else
     :new.last_updated_date := sysdate;
     :new.last_updated_by := sys_context('USERENV','OS_USER
    ') || ' ' || sys_context('USERENV','HOST') || ' ' || sys_context('USERENV','IP_ADDRESS');
  end if;

end;
/

-- 
Jared Still
Certifiable Oracle DBA and Part Time Perl Evangelist



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Received on Tue Jul 01 2008 - 12:49:43 CDT