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