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The Voice of the DBA

Security is Getting Serious

OK, if we can't trust computer chips, what do we do? It almost feels like the security war to protect information, or at least keep it private, might be lost before our very eyes in the next decade.

There's a story about a back door being hidden inside a chip. That's nefarious, and entirely plausable. After all, how many people, forget about the millions that aren't technical, how many people in the world can analyze chip designs for back doors? How many people would have to be corrupted, bribed, threatened, etc to make this happen? It's probably very few.

We have enough issues with back doors or flaws in software. We can't even patch, upgrade, or change that quickly. Imagine if computer chips in PCs, routers, wifi cards, really any widely used device had a back door implanted? We would have fundamental security flaws for quite some time. 

This sounds like a movie plot and I really hope that's the level of reality here. However, as more companies look to spec their own hardware, especially large cloud vendors, this is disconcerting. After all, inside a company there can't be extensive reviews of designs for security flaws. Many companies might outsource the manufacturing of their chips to another company. In that case, could employees of the manufacturer look to embed back doors in chips? I'd hope designs are presented, manudactured, and then discarded quick enough to prevent anyone from engineering a back door into the hardware, but I'm not sure how difficult this is, or how much change would be needed to a design.

I suppose there isn't much any of us can do if this possibility is feasible, but we certainly can keep abreast of security issues and perhaps ensure we use a variety of hardware so that any particular issue doesn't affect our entire infrastructure.

Steve Jones from SQLServerCentral.com

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Featured Contents

 

SQL Authentication Via AD Groups Part III: What About Orphaned Users?

John F. Tamburo from SQLServerCentral.com

With AD Authentication via groups, SQL Server is vulnerable to orphaned Windows users' logins being added to SQL Server at a later date. This article gives an improved user audit script that detects orphaned DB Users and also a delete script. More »


 

SQL Server 2016 - what's changed in the SQL Toolbelt?

Additional Articles from Redgate

Over recent months, Redgate’s development teams have been busy updating the tools in the SQL Toolbelt to support the valuable new functionality released with SQL Server 2016. To achieve this, most tools now support the syntax for SQL Server 2016’s key features, letting you do even more with them. Learn mor. More »


 

Encrypting and Decrypting SQL Server Stored Procedures, Views and User-Defined Functions

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You work in a shop that puts business or application logic in SQL Server using stored procedures, views and functions to return values to the calling applications or perform tasks. This is not unusual for companies that use the SQL Server layer to perform More »


 

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Question of the Day

Today's Question (by Steve Jones):

I want to replicate data from a publisher to a subscriber in SQL Server 2016. Where can I use memory optimized tables?

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Yesterday's Question of the Day

Yesterday's Question (by Steve Jones):

What happens when I run this batch in SQL Server 2014? 

 CREATE TYPE Steve FROM NUMERIC(4, 2); CREATE TABLE Steve ( id INT ); GO 

Answer: Both objects are created.

Explanation:

This is behavior that is allowed in SQL Server 2014,and SQL 2016, as well as potentially other versions. The type is stored in sys.types. The table is stored in sys.objects, so there is no naming conflict here.

Note, this could be considered a bug or unwanted behavior, but it is allowed.

Ref: sys.types - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms188021.aspx

sys.objects - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190324.aspx


» Discuss this question and answer on the forums

Featured Script

Replication Monitor

Jignesh Raiyani from SQLServerCentral.com

Logreader agent will insert error into distribution..MSrepl_errors.
we can set this procedure into Monitor. which will call this sp for every five minute.
when result set : 0 then Normal, when 1 Then error found in replication.
once record inserted in DBA_Replication_Error_Log then
Alert will displayed in monitor and we need to truncate DBA_Replication_Error_Log table.

More »

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