Oracle Security Blog

Protection of sensitive data while at-rest, in-motion or in-use all need to be addressed as part of a holistic security strategy. This includes both Personally Identifiable Information (PII) as well as sensitive PeopleSoft system configurations.

When performing a PeopleSoft security audit, Integrigy reviews the use and implementation of encryption within all components of the PeopleSoft technology stack. This includes the following, all which are critical. Review yours today and contact Integrigy with any questions.

PeopleSoft Public users are not required to authenticate (sign on). These are generic accounts created for specific purposes, for example informational pages and/or company directories. Public users are also not subject to timeouts (session inactivity). Because no authentication is required, no sensitive data should be accessible to these users. It also goes without saying, that if you don’t need Public accounts, don’t use them.

Oracle has released support for TLS 1.2 in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 and 12.2.  Previously, Oracle E-Business Suite only supported SSLv3 and TLS 1.0, which are no longer approved for use with Federal systems and are not PCI-DSS compliant as of June 2014.  For TLS 1.2 support, new My Oracle Support (MOS) documents are available:

Enabling TLS in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.2 (Doc ID 1367293.1)

Enabling TLS in Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 (Doc ID 376700.1)

Being hospitable and welcoming to guests is usually considered good manners.  That said, being a gracious host does not mean you should be careless with your security.

With regard to PeopleSoft application security, the user GUEST is a default account created with the installation of PeopleSoft.  When performing a PeopleSoft security audit, several attributes of the GUEST user are reviewed, including the following -  take a look today at your settings:

For the GUEST user:

When performing a PeopleSoft security audit, reviewing what rights and privileges individual users have been granted for system and application security privileges (authorization) is one of the key deliverables. The following are several of the topics that Integrigy investigates during our PeopleSoft security configuration assessments - take a look today at your settings:

Review users with access to

Securing the PeopleSoft Integration Broker (IB) ensures the security of messaging both within PeopleSoft applications and among third-party systems. The following are several of the key tasks that Integrigy performs during our PeopleSoft security configuration assessments - take a look today at your settings:

Logging and auditing are one of the pillars of PeopleSoft Security.  Both application and database auditing is required. Logging and auditing support a trust-but-verify approach which is often deemed required to secure the activities of privileged system and database administrators.

While both the application and database offer sophisticated auditing solutions, one key feature Integrigy always recommends is to ensure that EnableDBMononitoring is enabled within the psappssrv.cfg file. This is set by default but we at times find it disabled.

PeopleSoft, similar to other major ERP applications, while depending on a database to store information, arguably does not secure the supporting database. The security of the database is the client’s responsibility.

In order to give a few examples of what we are talking about when we refer to database security, the following are several of the 200+ database security checks that Integrigy performs during our PeopleSoft security configuration assessments - take a look today at your database for a few quick checks:

The prior blog post (PeopleSoft Security Patches) reviewed PeopleSoft CPU patching. Worthy of its own post is the October 2014 CPU. A show of hands back in April at our PeopleSoft database security presentation at Collaborate 2016 (PeopleSoft Database Security) further confirmed Integrigy’s research that a surprising number of PeopleSoft installations have not applied this patch.

The process of applying security patches starts with identifying which patches to apply. For PeopleSoft, security patches need to be considered for both the application and the major technical components. The application of security patches, referred to by Oracle as Critical Patch Updates (CPUs), for one component DO NOT apply security patches for the other components.

For example, PeopleTools CPU patches DO NOT include database CPUs – applying one will not automatically apply nor include the other. The same holds for WebLogic and Tuxedo CPU patches.

Throughout the summer, Integrigy will be releasing new research on PeopleSoft security. This research focuses on the secure configuration of PeopleSoft and includes both the application and the major technical components such as the database (Oracle RDBMS), WebLogic and Jolt/Tuxedo. Hopefully, these blog posts will be useful.

If you have questions, please contact us at info@integrigy.com

Michael A. Miller, CISSP-ISSMP, CCSP

No, Oracle security vulnerabilities didn’t just get a whole lot worse this quarter.  Instead, Oracle updated the scoring metric used in the Critical Patch Updates (CPU) from CVSS v2 to CVSS v3.0 for the April 2016 CPU.  The Common Vulnerability Score System (CVSS) is a generally accepted method for scoring and rating security vulnerabilities.  CVSS is used by Oracle, Microsoft, Cisco, and other major software vendors.

Oracle E-Business Suite 11i is impacted by 8 security vulnerabilities in the April 2016 CPU, which includes the Oracle Configurator and Oracle Complex Maintenance, Repair, and Overhaul security bugs listed under the Oracle Supply Chain Products Suite.

To start, the January 2016 Critical Patch Update (CPU) for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is significant and high-risk. 

With the start of the new year, it is now time to think about Oracle Critical Patch Updates for 2016.  Oracle releases security patches in the form of Critical Patch Updates (CPU) each quarter (January, April, July, and October).  These patches include important fixes for security vulnerabilities in the Oracle Database.  The CPUs are only available for certain versions of the Oracle Database, therefore, advanced planning is required to ensure supported versions are being used and potentially mitigating controls may be required when the CPUs can not be applied in a timely mann