QEMU HACK
02.10.2022

How to change root password of running VM

You may already read my articles about virtualization/cloud security: In the above articles I was impersonating an evil cloud administrator and showing you how this kind of person can access and modify even encrypted data. We will continue this fun, but this time you may also use this trick when you forget root password in […]


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KVM + TTE + VMI
15.04.2021

KVM – how to read encrypted Oracle Database blocks from Virtual Machine memory

Remember my post, regarding dumping the SGA to read encrypted blocks? What if I tell you, that you can do the same, while being a KVM host administrator with no credentials to a VM itself? Let’s prepare our secure database in a way I did in article AMM vs security. After enabling Oracle Wallet and […]


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KVM
30.03.2021

Cloud/KVM/VDSM/SRIOV/WTF security…

So apparently this cloud-thing is here for good. You may even say that it became endemic 😉 With cloud there is one potential problem – the bigger and heavier it is, the more possible is the leak. Cloud after all is just a virtualization in a big scale and if you go to public cloud […]


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ODBV3
17.09.2018

ODBV3 – more comfortable usage

It has been crazy few months – organizing POUG2018 took a lot of energy but it was satisfying as hell! 😀 This weekend I had some time to prepare a new version of ODBV for Trivadis Performance Days 2018 where I’ll be talking about the internals of database block storage. The series of articles about […]


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SGADUMP
10.07.2018

Dumping SGA to read encrypted blocks

After my last article AMM vs security, Martin Berger wrote to me: well, even without AMM you can do it: write your own process which attaches to the same shm segments – and use its memory mapping (?) My response was that it is also possible with ASMM but AMM makes it extremely easy. And […]


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AMM
18.05.2018

AMM vs security

Most of us already know that AMM sucks. But usually, we think about disadvantages of AMM in terms of performance. Let’s see why it sucks in the terms of security 😉 Let’s create an encrypted tablespace for HR.EMPLOYEES and protect HR schema with Database Vault. Contents of sqlnet.ora Now we will use dbca to configure […]


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RICO2 & BBED
14.02.2018

Project RICO2 and the history of APEX upgrade that went terribly wrong.

In my last blog post I explained a XOR alghorithm that is used to count Oracle database block checksum. I also wrote, that sometimes you are facing problems, that are unresolvable without a low-level knowledge. This is the story of this kind of situation. The story of misread documentation. The story of haste and hex. […]


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GDB
28.01.2018

Oracle database block checksum XOR algorithm explained

Recently I’ve started to write my own clone of BBED to have something handy and useful in extreme cases when you have to go deep and fix stuff on low level (I have only like 2 such cases a year but each time it is really fun and a nice money 😉 ) When I’ll […]


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ODBV
21.12.2017

ODBVv2 – ghostdata busters

Some time ago I wrote a simple tool to learn about Oracle data block internals – ODBV. The series of articles can be found here: https://blog.ora-600.pl/?s=odbv&submit= and the github repo is here: https://github.com/ora600pl/odbv This is not a production tool but during the last session in Birmingham at UKOUG_TECH17 – where I was doing a presentation […]


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