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Auditing Database Activity

This document discusses auditing in Oracle Databases. Auditing monitors and records selected user actions in the database. It is used to enable accountability, deter inappropriate actions, investigate suspicious activity, notify of unauthorized access, detect problems with authorization implementations, address compliance requirements, and monitor database activities. Standard auditing is configured using initialization parameters and SQL statements, while fine-grained auditing allows auditing at a more granular level based on data access and content.

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41 views2 pages

Auditing Database Activity

This document discusses auditing in Oracle Databases. Auditing monitors and records selected user actions in the database. It is used to enable accountability, deter inappropriate actions, investigate suspicious activity, notify of unauthorized access, detect problems with authorization implementations, address compliance requirements, and monitor database activities. Standard auditing is configured using initialization parameters and SQL statements, while fine-grained auditing allows auditing at a more granular level based on data access and content.

Uploaded by

Jehanzeb Kayani
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Auditing Database Activity

This chapter contains:

 About Auditing
 Why Is Auditing Used?
 Where Are Standard Audit Activities Recorded?
 Auditing General Activities Using Standard Auditing
 Tutorial: Creating a Standard Audit Trail
 Guidelines for Auditing
 Initialization Parameters Used for Auditing
See Also:

 Oracle Database Security Guide for other ways that you can audit user and database activities
 Oracle Audit Vault Administrator's Guide for information about Oracle Audit Vault, which
provides advanced auditing features

About Auditing
Auditing is the monitoring and recording of selected user database actions. In standard auditing, you use
initialization parameters and the AUDIT and NOAUDIT SQL statements to audit SQL statements,
privileges, and schema objects, and network and multitier activities.

There are also activities that Oracle Database always audits, regardless of whether auditing is enabled.
These activities are administrative privilege connections, database startups, and database shutdowns.
See Oracle Database Security Guide for more information.

Another type of auditing is fine-grained auditing. Fine-grained auditing enables you to audit at the most
granular level, data access, and actions based on content, using Boolean measurement, such as value >
1000. You can use fine-grained auditing to audit activities based on access to or changes in a column.
You can create security policies to trigger auditing when someone accesses or alters specified elements
in an Oracle database, including the contents within a specified object. You can create policies that
define specific conditions that must take place for the audit to occur. For example, you can audit a
particular table column to find out when and who tried to access it during a specified period of time.
Furthermore, you can create alerts that are triggered when the policy is violated, and write this data to a
separate audit file. Oracle Database Security Guide explains how to perform fine-grained auditing.

Why Is Auditing Used?


You typically use auditing to perform the following activities:

 Enable accountability for actions. These include actions taken in a particular schema, table, or
row, or affecting specific content.
 Deter users from inappropriate actions based on that accountability.
 Investigate suspicious activity. For example, if a user is deleting data from tables, then a
security administrator might decide to audit all connections to the database and all successful
and unsuccessful deletions of rows from all tables in the database.
 Notify an auditor of actions by an unauthorized user. For example, an unauthorized user
could change or delete data, or a user has more privileges than expected, which can lead to
reassessing user authorizations.
 Detect problems with an authorization or access control implementation. For example, you
can create audit policies that you expect will never generate an audit record because the data is
protected in other ways. However, if these policies do generate audit records, then you will
know the other security controls are not properly implemented.
 Address auditing requirements for compliance. Regulations such as the following have
common auditing-related requirements:
o Sarbanes-Oxley Act
o Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
o International Convergence of Capital Measurement and Capital Standards: a
Revised Framework (Basel II)
o Japan Privacy Law
o European Union Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications
 Monitor and gather data about specific database activities. For example, the database
administrator can gather statistics about which tables are being updated, how many logical I/O
operations are performed, or how many concurrent users connect at peak times.

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