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Oracle Auditing Part 3: Unified Auditing

This is the third, and last, article on the topic of Oracle auditing. It is relevant to Oracle 12c
only. With Unified Auditing, Oracle simplified the task of auditing activities in a modern
database environment, and rather than having to learn multiple methods, patterns, and
techniques for both different tasks and different Oracle modules, all audit trails go to the
same place and use the same definitions. There are however some downsides – some
related to previous investments that you may have already done and some related to
deprecated features – mainly the inability to use syslog auditing any more. This is more
serious than it sounds, because pretty much all SIEM integrations have been based on
syslog auditing in the past.

The main benefit of Unified Auditing is that it consistently supports all types of auditing
including Standard Auditing introduced in Part 1 and both Mandatory and Fine-Grained Auditing introduced in Part 2 of this series. The second main benefit is that
Unified Auditing supports all the modules consistently – in addition to the database modules
such as RMAN, Data Pump, SQL*Loader, and security modules such as Database Vault
and Oracle Label Security.

There are two Unified Auditing modes. Mixed Mode allows you to use both Unified Auditing
but also all the auditing features that existed before Unified Auditing as described in Part 1
and Part 2 of this series. This is a default mode and allows you to “flow into” Unified Auditing
without breaking any existing investment. The audit records go into the standard locations as
well as into the SYS.UNIFIED_AUDIT_TRAIL location. The second mode, PURE mode,
disables all the existing methods and only writes audit records to the Unified Auditing
location. It is likely that while the current default is Mixed Mode, in future major versions
Oracle will make PURE mode the default.

To see whether Unified Auditing is enabled in your database do:

select PARAMETER, VALUE from V$OPTION where PARAMETER = ‘Unified Auditing’;
The new fundamental building block of Unified Auditing is the audit policy. When using
mixed-mode you create a new audit policy using CREATE AUDIT POLICY, enable it using
the AUDIT command, and can view the content of existing policies by selecting from
AUDIT_UNIFIED_POLICIES, which maps the policy to the audit options. There are also a
few built-in audit policies included with the database such as ORA_SECURECONFIG and
ORA_ACCOUNT_MGMT. To see which policies are enabled by default select from
AUDIT_UNIFIED_ENABLED_POLICIES.

To exit mixed-mode and enable PURE mode you need to stop all services and relink the
database with the uniaud_on option using (on *nix):

Cd $ORACLE_HOME/rdbms/lib
make –f ins_rdbms.mk uniaud_on ioracle

While Unified Auditing does have a new syntax, if you have already learned how to use
Standard Auditing, the learning curve will be short. For example, to create a policy that will
audit selects that are using the SELECT ANY privilege performed by the user SCOTT, do:

create audit policy aud_scott 
  PRIVILEGES select any table
  WHEN 'SYS_CONTEXT(''USERENV'',''SESSION_USER'')=''SCOTT'''
  EVALUATE PER STATEMENT;

and then enable the policy using:

audit policy aud_scott;

To create rules based on activity performed use the ACTIONS modifier – e.g.:

create audit policy aud_scott 
  ACTIONS select, insert, update, delete
  WHEN 'SYS_CONTEXT(''USERENV'',''SESSION_USER'')=''SCOTT'''
  EVALUATE PER STATEMENT;

Fine-grained auditing still uses the FGA packages, but the audit records will also be inserted
into the Unified Audit trail.

Architectural Changes

When you use Unified Auditing the new schema AUDSYS is used for storage of all audit
data, rather than keeping the data in the SYS schema (in mixed modes the previous
locations in SYS are still populated in parallel).
Two new database roles are added for better separation of duties: AUDIT_ADMIN for policy
configuration and audit administration and AUDIT_VIEWER for viewing and reading audit
data.
But perhaps the most important architectural change is that Unified Auditing is directly linked
into the SGA and provides better performance and lower overhead when doing a lot of
auditing.

Summary

Unified Auditing was introduced in Oracle 12c as a single unified platform for all types of
auditing and is consistent for all modules that make up a modern database environment. It
simplifies the task of auditing, but since it still is very robust and full-featured, it takes a while
to get used to it. This is made even more complex with all the various Database as a Service
offerings since the audit records “go a different way” (e.g., to CloudWatch in Amazon RDS).
This complexity at two dimensions is what prompted us at Imperva to provide a
comprehensive, yet simple database security solution to cover both on-premise and cloud
deployments of Oracle and other databases. Talk to us to learn more.

The post Oracle Auditing Part 3: Unified Auditing appeared first on Blog.

*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Blog authored by Ron Bennatan. Read the original post at: https://www.imperva.com/blog/oracle-auditing-part-3-unified-auditing/