Speaking at Midlands PASS Chapter tonight

The Midlands PASS Chapter is an official PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) chapter located in Columbia, SC. It’s free to attend our meetings, which are typically held the 2nd Thursday of each month.

Once a year we like to do an open forum on SQL Server security. It’s typically held in February, but was postponed due to the inclement weather. Therefore, we’re holding the open forum tonight, March 13, 2014, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. The first part of every meeting is meet and greet to give folks time to network. Then we settle in for a presentation, or in this case, a forum discussion.

The SQL Server security open forum is as it sounds: folks are free to bring up whatever they want to with regards to SQL Server security and as a community we’ll try to take things apart and come up with the best answer. While I may focus on SQL Server security, I don’t have all the answers. None of us do. That’s why a few years ago we went to this more free form discussion.

If you’re in the area and would like to attend, please drop on by. We meet at Microstaff IT in Cayce, SC at 440 Knox Abbot Drive (tower with Bank of America logo on the top). If you look on Google Maps, the address is marked wrong. Google Maps is pointing at the shopping center right next to the tower, but the parking lots are connected.

A summary of the SQL Server security #datachat is live

Recently I posted about participating in a #datachat about SQL Server security. As it turned out, we didn’t talk about SQL Server security, but data security. It was a good discussion with quite a few knowledgeable folks joining in. A summary of the discussion including some highlighted tweets can be found here:

Four Critical Challenges in Implementing Data Security: A Conversation with SQL Server and Security Experts

The #datachats are community open forum discussions. You just have to know when to show up on Twitter! To see what topics are coming up and when they’re scheduled, check out the #datachat schedule.

Auditing VMware vCenter Actions (on SQL Server)

When you’ve got a SIEM appliance or application, you want actions and events going into it as a central repository. That allows you to see patterns and hopefully track incidents across systems. As a result, if you want to track actions in VMware’s vCenter and you’ve got the database hosted on SQL Server, you need to give access to the following two tables:

• VPX_EVENT
• VPX_EVENT_ARG

A standard tendency is to give the account that the SIEM product is using membership in the db_datareader role. Don’t do this. It’s a violation of the Principle of Least Privilege. It’s far better to create a user-defined role and granting it the appropriate permissions. Then make the account a member of the role. For instance:

USE VirtualCenterDB;
GO

CREATE ROLE [Auditor];
GO

GRANT SELECT ON OBJECT::dbo.VPX_EVENT TO [Auditor];
GRANT SELECT ON OBJECT::dbo.VPX_EVENT_ARG TO [Auditor];
GO


And then you make the user account being used by the SIEM product a member of the Auditor role.

The weakest link in database security

The weakest link in database security is the same as for most all IT security: people.

Because the weakest link is always people, we have adopted a principle called The Principle of Least Privilege to determine how we should assign security. If you’ve never heard of it, it’s a basic concept with some easy to follow rules:

1. Give enough rights to do the job.
2. Don’t give any more.
3. Don’t give any less.

#2 is particularly relevant. It’s easy to violate this, especially when SQL Server is concerned. If you’ve ever heard, “Just give the application db_datareader,” you’ve heard a violation of this principle. The same is true with db_datawriter. Why is this a violation? Let’s ask a few basic questions.

• Does the application (report / user / etc.) need access to all tables in the database?
• Does the application (report / user / etc.) need access to all view in the database?
• Are you sure the application (report / user /etc.) needs access to the catalog views (the system objects) for the database?

Often times, the risk is understated: “Well, so-and-so is completely safe. He would never do anything wrong with the data.” Yes, that particular person may be safe. Then again, life changes may alter that person’s morals and ethics. It’s amazing how much major events like a divorce, like medical bills, like gambling debts, like a new drug habit change those things. But let’s say the person is completely safe. Are you safe? No.

The problem isn’t the person. It’s the person’s user account. If someone were able to run under the context of the user account, he or she can do whatever the account can do. Give the account too many privileges and you’ve got a problem. If someone is willing to compromise an account, they are likely going to have few qualms about swiping important data.

See, it’s relatively hard to directly attack a database server and in a trusted environment. It’s much easier to slip a trojan in to an email or mail a link which leads to the malware being installed on the user’s computer. And then, BAM!, the attacker is in as that user and the attacker now has the user’s access to the database. If you’ve given too much access, that’s bad.

Therefore, given the weakest link in database security, the best practice is to follow The Principle of Least Privilege. Don’t leave it until the end and try to retrofit. You’ll likely be forced to rush and that’s when people cut corners with db_datareader and db_datawriter. Instead, get it attacked at the start of a project / development effort. Get it right from the beginning.