Potential Vulnerabilities in Oracle Internet Application Server



Versions Affected:

The first potential vulnerability is found in the WebDB/Portal component

of Oracle Internet Application Server (iAS) Listener and modplsql, up to

and including release 3.0.7 (associated modplsql version is 3.0.0.8.1).

The second potential vulnerability affects all versions of the PL/SQL

gateway including Oracle Application Server (OAS), the WebDB/Portal

listener, and iAS.



Platforms Affected:

All platforms.



Description:

The first possible vulnerability is essentially a configuration issue

associated with the Portal Listener and modplsql. When these are

installed, the default configuration allows all users access to the

Listener and modplsql administration pages.



A second potential vulnerability may occur if customers grant public

access to PL/SQL procedures, in particular those which access an Oracle

database such as OWA, SYS and DBMS.  Since publicly accessible

procedures may be accessed through a URL, it may be possible to to

invoke these procedures through a URL and cause SQL statements to be

executed on a back-end Oracle database.



Likelihood of Occurrence:

The first vulnerability may occur if the default permission for admin

pages is not changed after WebDB/Portal install.  The second

vulnerability depends on the design of applications which use the PL/SQL

gateway, but may occur whenever procedures are granted public access.



Possible Symptoms:

The first vulnerability may allow unauthorized access to administrative

pages.  The second vulnerability may allow unauthorized access to data

within a back-end Oracle database.



Workaround:

The workaround for the first vulnerability is to specify that the

Listener and modplsql administrator must be one or more known users.

This may be done by simply editing the wdbsvr.app configuration file on

WebDB/Portal.  All versions of the Listener and modplqsl use this file;

at the top of the file is a setting entitled 'administrators='.

Customers should set this property to specify one or more named users

who are allowed to have  administrative privileges.



In addition, customers can change the path used to reference the admin

pages.  By default  this path is 'admin_', but can be changed in the

wdbsvr.app file to something else (e.g., changing it to 'foo' would

change the admin page URL to

http://:/pls/foo/gateway.htm).



Customers who have granted public access to PL/SQL procedures on

WebDB/Portal can mitigate the risk associated with second vulnerability

in two ways.



The first is to revoke public access to procedures such as OWA, SYS and

DBMS which can potentially execute user-specified SQL statements.



For modplsql in iAS, a second solution is to disable access to URLs

which match certain criteria.  For example, in the case of SYS, OWA, and

DBMS this may be done by adding the following  rules to the plsql.conf

file:



# Disallow direct access to any PL/SQL procedure in the SYS schema, in

particular sys.dbms_job:



  SetHandler pls_handler

  Order deny,allow

  Deny from all





# Disallow direct access to any DBMS* PL/SQL procedure which is called

thru public synonyms:



  SetHandler pls_handler

  Order deny,allow

  Deny from all





# Disallow direct access to any owa_util procedure:



  SetHandler pls_handler

  Order deny,allow

  Deny from all





Note that since Apache treats these rules as case sensitive, the first

rule prevents access to any URL including sys.*, but would allow access

to URLs with SYS.* or Sys.*.  It may be therefore be necessary to

include additional rules with different case combinations in the names

of the procedures (e.g., repeat rule 1 in the config. file, substituting

SYS.*, Sys.*, etc. for sys.*).



Note also that the plsql.conf file can be configured to include rules

which prevent access to URLs containing specific SQL statements such as

select, insert, grant, etc., keeping in mind that rules are case

sensitive.



Patches:

Release 3.0.8 of Portal will restrict default access to the Listener and

modplsql admin pages on installation.



Oracle is developing enhancements for iAS which will allow customers to

define case insensitive rules to disable access to certain procedures

via URL.