Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

The excellent open source project Oracle Password Repository (OPR) has been updated to a new version 1.1.6 beta today 24 May 2005. The project can be found on sourceforge and the page is called "Project: Oracle Password Repository: Summary". Quoting from the page the project can be described as follows:

"OPR (Oracle Password Repository) is a Unix based secure tool for storage & retrieval of Oracle database passwords. By replacing hard coded passwords in scripts with a call to OPR, it helps keeping your Oracle environment secure and easier to maintain."

The software is great for getting rid of passwords that are held in source code files as hard coded passwords. Instead they are moved to a repository that is the essence of this software.

The changes are listed in the change log and are not major, there are documentation changes, output cosmetics and some changes to C function calls to improve security. Jan-Marten Spit, one of the authors has emailed me today to let me know of the updates. The code is purely beta status because of a lack of a range of test platforms. The beta status will be removed after testing has proved other platforms.

This software is well worth a look if you use batch processes or even on-line processes that currently require hard coded passwords to exist.