Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

Just a quick post this evening; I have had a busy day. Last night i spoke at the inaugural meeting of the OWASP Leeds chapter which was a really good meeting; good audience and some good participation. Jason opened the proceedings and then Justin Clarke launched into a very enjoyable talk on SQL Injection. The talk covered most aspects of SQL injection but from a reasonably high level. I thought the most interesting thing Justin said (note all of the talk was interesting but this bit stood out for me) was that there is nothing new in SQL Injection and indeed there hasn't been anything new in the last 5 or more years (I think his slide said 7 years, but i may have remembered that wrong) and that all the main ideas and discoveries were done in the first few years of SQL Injection (some 10 or more years ago) and that now all thats being done is variations on existing ideas.

Firstly, I find this interesting as if the main ideas of exploiting via SQL injection were 5 - 7 years ago then the big problem (i.e. why people are still getting injected) must be lack of training, lack of acceptance of the problem, lack of work on the systems to protect agains SQl Injection or perhaps the wrong protections? It was a really interesting idea though.

After Justin finished I launched into the "Right way to secure Oracle"; this is a talk I have done before for the UKOUG but i modified it a bit and extended it to one hour. The talk basically looks at the reasons why you must start with the data if you want to have a hope of securing your database. This talk seemed to go down well and I have had quite a few emails today from people who were there complementing me on it. The slides are on my Oracle security white papers page.