Re: Security and the ODBC

Ums.Harald@fhm.de (Harald Ums) wrote: ...snip... :Or there should be (my favorite) an additional authentication process :on the database to identify a program. :One way for that would be roles with passwords: the user as default :readonly status, only the application puts him into a special :read/write status. :But this is currently not possible with informix. So the user should supply an extra password for the role I asume. That in itself is bad, but may be it could be the same as the password to get into the database (the Unix users password for Informix). In that case this would be ok. Now the role names are known. They can be read from the database. As the set role statement can be easily executed from any deasant sql tool the user could do this himself, supplying the known password. To me this is a big hole in this solution. Of course the role names could have been made inaccessible for the users (no read access to the appropriate system tables). I haven't ever checked if that is possible with Informix, but even if it where it's not that good an idea to rely on such a thing. For administration purposes the role names would have to be the same in every database. For us that sell our applications it would be hard at least in the long run to keep the role names secret. The only real solution is at the connection level where program names, application names, machine/terminal names and other things should be checked before access is granted at some level. Nils.Myklebust@idg.no NM Data AS, P.O.Box 9090 Gronland, N-0133 Oslo, Norway My opinions are those of my company The Informix FAQ is at http://www.iiug.org