BBED - Oracle Block Browser and Editor

[pete () petefinnigan com]

Hi All,

I just posted an entry to my blog about the Oracle BBED tool. It was shipped as a binary on some Windows platforms in 
the past and as an object file on *Nix platforms that can be built with a shipped make file. I reported this tool as a 
security risk some years ago to Oracle. 

I came across a great paper on how to use the tool this evening and it reminded me of why I thought it was a security 
risk. A good example would to chnage the SYS password hash to a known value and then log in, or to defeat VPD and read 
protected data, recover deleted data, remove audit trail entries and many more..... 

This could be done without any database audit trail being created. The paper shows examples of how data can be changed 
without database authentication (server access is needed). My blog entry is at 
http://www.petefinnigan.com/weblog/archives/00000999.htm and the paper is at 
http://orafaq.com/papers/dissassembling_the_data_block.pdf

cheers

Pete Finnigan