I would like to draw your attention to a particularly dangerous security vulnerability, which was recently published by David Litchfield.

How dangerous is the vulnerability?

Any database user, who has “create session” privilege, which means, who can log into the database, can use the security hole to execute any OS command in the ownership of the oracle database owner. This means, that both denial of service as well as access to all data is exposed.

Which versions are affected?

Affected are database versions 10.2.0.4 (incl. 10.2.0.4.3 containing latest security patches as of January 2010) as well as 11g (incl. 11.2.0.1).

What can I do to close this security vulernability?

You can revoke privileges from PUBLIC:

revoke execute on dbms_java from PUBLIC;
revoke execute on dbms_java_test from PUBLIC;
revoke execute on “oracle/aurora/util/Wrapper” from PUBLIC;
grant execute on sys.dbms_jvm_exp_perms to IMP_FULL_DATABASE;
grant execute on sys.dbms_jvm_exp_perms to EXP_FULL_DATABASE;
revoke execute on sys.dbms_jvm_exp_perms from PUBLIC;

If you are using a third party vendor application, you should contact your vendor to check compatibility with revoked privileges or test before implementing in production.

I have come across a short post on Pete Finnigan´s Oracle Security Weblog, who informed about the release of new Metasploit modules usable for penetration testing of Oracle databases.

What is Metasploit?

Metasploit is a framework, which enables automatic utilization of all kinds of exploits to test security of a system. Among others, there is an Oracle module.

To get some idea about what is possible, watch this: Attacking Oracle with the Metasploit Framework Shmoocon Firetalk Demo Video. In a very impressive 5 minute video, the presenter demonstrates how to use Oracle Listener version identification, SID brute force, well known username/password combinations (e.g. scott/tiger), gets access to scott, privilege escalates to dba, plants a java class to exec os commands, etc… You get the idea….

This will be something to watch out for, because it will enable script-kiddies to attack badly secured databases connected to the internet, or well trained rogue internal employees to attack databases, which do not have critical patch updates for well known security vulnerabilities installed.

A reuters report about this new release can you find here.

Update 2009-08-13: The metasploit developer has uploaded new demo videos of how to hack an oracle database with metasploit.

I have added a new book review to my bookshelf: HOWTO Secure and Audit Oracle 10g and 11g – Ron Ben Natan