Everyone gives lip service to the importance of security, but it’s often relegated to the back-burner in actual practice.  For example, my anecdotal experience is that when conference attendees are polled about Critical Patch Updates, usually fewer than 50% of the respondents state that they’re up-to-date on the latest CPU. One potentially complicating factor is that there are many things that one can do to secure the E-Business Suite, and it may be hard to know where to start.  At minimum, all Apps DBAs should be intimately familiar with these documents: There are many other security-related Oracle products that you can use with your E-Business Suite environment, too.  Eric Bing and Robert Armstrong profiled all of the latest security-related tools and options that are relevant to E-Business Suite users in their recent OpenWorld 2009 session:  
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Eric and Robert cover the following topics in their presentation:
  • Business drivers and security challenges
    • Database Defense-in-Depth
    • Options for monitoring, access control, and encryption & masking
    • End-to-end security strategies
  • Building a secure E-Business Suite configuration
    • Password policies for Apps and DB accounts (and reference notes)
    • Security profile option settings and recommendations
    • FND Validation Level feature
    • Fixed Key profiles
    • Non-reversible password hashing
  • Externalizing EBS security from the apps tier
    • Apps schema access via SOA Suite Apps Adapter
    • Application Data Source implementation
    • Java Authentication & Authorization Service (JAAS) for E-Business Suite
    • Using Oracle Access Manager
  • Other EBS security integrations and technologies
    • Oracle Audit Vault and client identifiers
    • Oracle Database Vault and segregation of duties
    • Oracle Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) for columns and tablespaces
    • Oracle Label Security (OLS) and Virtual Private Database (VPD)
  • Future directions for E-Business Suite security
Listening to the Session If you registered for OpenWorld, here’s a link to the OpenWorld On Demand page where you can download the presentation or listen to the live recording of this session. Related Articles