Forum

Home/Forum

Welcome, Guest. Please Login. Jul 11^th, 2025, 9:33am News: Welcome to Pete Finnigan's Oracle security forum
Home \| Help \| Search \| Members \| Login

   Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Forum
   Oracle Security
   Oracle Security (Moderator: Pete Finnigan)
   TNS Poisoning

« Previous topic | Next topic »

Pages: 1

Reply | Notify of replies | Send Topic | Print

Author

Topic: TNS Poisoning (Read 17845 times)

Pete Finnigan
PeteFinnigan.com Administrator

Oracle Security is easier if you design for it

View Profile | WWW | Email

Gender: male

Posts: 309

TNS Poisoning
« on: May 29^th, 2012, 2:50pm »

Quote | Modify

You might have heared about the latest Oracle security bug, the TNS Poisoning bug. It's a bug that exists since Oracle 8i.

What's the problem?
With this bug it is possible to register a listener on a remote location on an Oracle instance. The problem with that is that you can listen in on Oracle network traffic.

Oracle made it possible to add remote listeners to an instance for Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC). Nowadays it is best practice in RAC systems to define (remote) so called SCAN listeners.

How big is the problem?
I don't know the CVSS score (the score that measures how severe a security bug is). Probably it's a pretty high CVSS score.

I've got questions of several people that never install Critical Patch Updates. Do that first, before you worry about this bug.

Why isn't the patch for this bug part of a Critical Patch Update?
The next Critical Patch Update will be available only in July. Very likely this bug will be solved in that CPU.

What is the solution at this moment?
There are three possible solutions: two for single instance databases (the usual setup) and one for RAC databases. See Oracle support note 1453883.1 for single instance and note 1340831.1 for RAC databases.

The short description: one of the solutions for single instance databases is a patch for bug 12880299. You can search patches on bugs in support.oracle.com. You�ll find it that way. The other single instance solution is changing the protocol with what de listener communicates with the database from TCP to IPC.

(I believe you also can turn of dynamic listener registration with a parameter. From then on you have to register a listener to the database manually.)

The RAC solution has to work around the fact that you actually want remote listeners to connect to a database. Remote SCAN listeners have become a best practice in high availability solutions. So Oracle had to think up a solution for that as well. And the solution is to protect listener-database communication with SSL. This solution is actually part of the Advanced Security option, but Oracle has allowed customers to use this particular Advanced Security functionality without having to pay for the license (if you don't have that license). If you implement any other functionality of the Oracle Advanced Security Option, you will have to pay for the license.

So if I choose the IPC solution, I don't need the patch?
It seems that way. I haven't tried it myself.

Why isn't there a patch for bug 12880299 on Windows?
Actually, there is: there is a patch for 11.1.0.7 and 11.2.0.3 on Windows (32 and 64 bit). It was issued later than the patches for Linux.

What's the impact of these solutions?
As far as I know: you have to restart one or more listeners.

IP Logged

Pete Finnigan (email:pete@petefinnigan.com)
Oracle Security Web site: https://www.petefinnigan.com
Forum: https://www.petefinnigan.com/forum/yabb/YaBB.cgi
Oracle security blog: https://www.petefinnigan.com/weblog/entries/index.html

Pete Finnigan
PeteFinnigan.com Administrator

Oracle Security is easier if you design for it

View Profile | WWW | Email

Gender: male

Posts: 309

Re: TNS Poisoning
« Reply #1 on: Jun 5^th, 2012, 12:38pm »

Quote | Modify

Hi,

Quote:

I don't know the CVSS score (the score that measures how severe a security bug is). Probably it's a pretty high CVSS score.

7.5 according to https://blogs.oracle.com/security/entry/security_alert_for_cve_2012

Quote:

Very likely this bug will be solved in that CPU.

More likely will be fixed in next release

Quote:

(I believe you also can turn of dynamic listener registration with a parameter. From then on you have to register a listener to the database manually.)

Indeed, DYNAMIC_REGISTRATION_LISTENER=off sounds wise. You will then be back to the good old SID_LIST_LISTENER days... Probably the best protection

IP Logged

Pete Finnigan
PeteFinnigan.com Administrator

Oracle Security is easier if you design for it

View Profile | WWW | Email

Gender: male

Posts: 309

Re: TNS Poisoning
« Reply #2 on: Jun 6^th, 2012, 2:21pm »

Quote | Modify

I've been reading a lot of Oracle CPU assessments by TeamSHATTER and I've learned that Oracle's CVSS scores can be lower due to their Partial+ scoring system. If not Oracle, the CVSS score would often be 9 or 10.

Quote:

Indeed, DYNAMIC_REGISTRATION_LISTENER=off sounds wise. You will then be back to the good old SID_LIST_LISTENER days... Probably the best protection

If this is the way things are going (less userfriendly is more secure) we'll be dealing with maxextent in no time. � Grin

IP Logged

Pete Finnigan
PeteFinnigan.com Administrator

Oracle Security is easier if you design for it

View Profile | WWW | Email

Gender: male

Posts: 309

Re: TNS Poisoning
« Reply #3 on: Sep 3^rd, 2012, 4:15pm »

Quote | Modify

Thanks Marcel-Jan for this post; sorry for the delayed reply. This has scoring being lowered has always been the case. I think it was Steve Kost who wrote about the scores and the calculations some years ago.

cheers

Pete

IP Logged

Pete Finnigan
PeteFinnigan.com Administrator

Oracle Security is easier if you design for it

View Profile | WWW | Email

Gender: male

Posts: 309

Re: TNS Poisoning
« Reply #4 on: Sep 3^rd, 2012, 5:07pm »

Quote | Modify

Bouncing on your answer, I must said that disabling dynamic registration proved difficult, whenever you use standby, apex, xml and family, you need workarounds and lose on flexibility

IP Logged

Pete Finnigan
PeteFinnigan.com Administrator

Oracle Security is easier if you design for it

View Profile | WWW | Email

Gender: male

Posts: 309

Re: TNS Poisoning
« Reply #5 on: Sep 3^rd, 2012, 7:48pm »

Quote | Modify

Thanks Laurent, for your feedback on this specifically for APEX, standby, XML etc; what workarounds did yout use and what was the trade off?

Kind regards

Pete

IP Logged

Pete Finnigan
PeteFinnigan.com Administrator

Oracle Security is easier if you design for it

View Profile | WWW | Email

Gender: male

Posts: 309

Re: TNS Poisoning
« Reply #6 on: Sep 3^rd, 2012, 8:11pm »

Quote | Modify

actually for standby it is all benefit, you just need to edit your StaticConnectIdentifier with dgmgrl to use sid instead of service_name, which also permits smoother switchover from command line

for apex it is not a requirment to use the apex listener, you could use an apache

for xmldb my workaround was to not use xmldb Tongue

Maybe other workaround exists

IP Logged

Pete Finnigan
PeteFinnigan.com Administrator

Oracle Security is easier if you design for it

View Profile | WWW | Email

Gender: male

Posts: 309

Re: TNS Poisoning
« Reply #7 on: Sep 4^th, 2012, 8:27am »

Quote | Modify

Hi Laurent,

Thanks for the update, i hope it is useful for those who have not worked to solve this issue yet.

Thanks

Pete

IP Logged

Pages: 1

Reply | Notify of replies | Send Topic | Print


« Previous topic \| Next topic »

PFCLScan
Simply connect PFCLScan to your Oracle database and it will automatically discover the security issues that could make your Oracle database vulnerable to attack and to the potential loss of your data.

Learn more
PFCLObfuscate
PFCLObfuscate is the only tool available that can automatically add license controls to your PL/SQL code. PFCLObfuscate protects your Intellectual Property invested in your PL/SQL database code.

Learn more
PFCLCode
PFCLCode is a tool to allow you to analyse your PL/SQL code for many different types of security issues. PFCLCode gives you a detailed review and reports and includes a powerful colour syntax highlighting code editor

Learn more
PFCLForensics
PFCLForensics is the only tool available to allow you to do a detailed live response of a breached Oracle database and to then go on and do a detailed forensic analysis of the data gathered.

Learn more
PFCLATK
PFCLATK is a toolkit that allows detailed pre-defined policy driven audit trails for your Oracle database. The toolkit also provides for a centralised audit trail and centralised activity reporting

Learn more
PFCLCookie
PFCLCookie is a useful tool to use to audit your websites for tracking cookies. Scan websites in a natural way using powerful browser driven scanner

Learn more
PFCLSEO
We offer a number of web based services such as cookie audits, improving website ranking in search engines, locating broken links and hosting email and websites

Learn more
PFCLTraining
PFCLTraining is a set of expert training classes for you, aimed at teaching how to audit your own Oracle database, design audit trails, secure code in PL/SQL and secure and lock down your Oracle database.

Learn more
PFCLServices
Choose PFCLServices to add PeteFinnigan.com Ltd to your team for your Oracle Security needs. We are experts in performing detailed security audits, data security design work and policy creation

Learn more
PFCLConsulting
Choose PFCLConsulting to ask PeteFinnigan.com Limited to set up and use our products on your behalf

Learn more
PFCLCustom
All of our software products can be customised at a number of levels. Choose this to see how our products can be part of your products and services

Learn more
PFCLCloud
Private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud or no cloud. Learn how all of our services, trainings and products will work in the cloud

Learn more
PFCLUserRights
PFCLUserRights allows you to create a very detailed view of database users rights. The focus of the reports is to allow you to decide what privileges and accounts to keep and which to remove.

Learn more
PFCLSTK
PFCLSTK is a toolkit application that allows you to provide database security easily to an existing database. PFCLSTK is a policy driven toolkit of PL/SQL that creates your security

Learn more
PFCLSFTK
PFCLSFTK is a toolkit that solves the problem of securing third party applications written in PL/SQL. It does this by creating a thin layer between the application and database and this traps SQL Injection attempts. This is a static firewall.

Learn more
PFCLReselling
PeteFinnigan.com Limited has partnered with a small number of relevant companies to resell their products where they enhance or compliment what we do

Learn more