Eight Important Oracle Storage Capabilities and Database Benefits

Oracle Intelligent Storage Protocol (OISP)
OISP is a unique communications protocol that enables Oracle Database 12c to communicate dynamically with the ZFS Storage Appliance to automatically tune critical factors, including logbias and record size, for optimal database performance. With OISP, storage administrators reduce manual tuning tasks by 65 percent, it is only available for ZFS Storage Appliances.

Oracle Database Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) for Oracle Exadata and Oracle Storage 
Systems Oracle Database HCC, available only with Oracle Exadata and Oracle storage systems, enables customers to compress data 12 to 50 times, depending on usage, resulting in a 3 to 5 times reduction in storage capacity requirements. HCC combines with new features in Oracle Database 12c to provide Heat Map and Automatic Data Optimization (ADO) in Oracle Advanced Compression.

Quality of Service (QoS) Plus for FS1
QoS Plus is a policy-based virtualization feature, incorporating business priority I/O (input/output) queue management fused with sub-LUN (logical unit number) automatic tiering into one simple management framework.

Application Profiles for FS1 Oracle FS1 Flash Storage System
Comes with predefined application profiles that provide tuned and tested out-of-the-box storage optimization for Oracle Database and key enterprise applications, including non-Oracle applications such as Microsoft Exchange.

Hybrid Storage Pools 
Oracle ZFS Storage Appliances leverage Hybrid Storage Pools intelligent data caching algorithm and architecture to ensure that up to 70–90 percent of “hot” I/O is processed in DRAM (in memory) — up to  44 2TB per system, frequently accessed data is cached in flash, and less-frequently accessed data is read from disk when needed. This ensures continuous and optimal storage performance and efficiency, with no enduser involvement required (refer to Chapter 2 for a full description).


Snap Management Utility
The Oracle Snap Management Utility for Oracle Database is a standalone management tool specifically engineered to work with the ZFS Storage Appliance. It provides

1.  A simple, fast, efficient, and automatic way to back up, restore, clone, and provision Oracle Databases that are stored on the ZFS Storage Appliance — all performed directly by the database administrator with a graphical user interface 
2.  One-step provisioning of database copies to accelerate development and test environments 
3.  Support for Oracle Solaris, Linux, and Windows clients and database hosts, for databases configured for NAS or SAN storage types 
4.  Support for Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC)

Oracle Enterprise Manager (EM) and Oracle VM Integration 

Oracle EM is Oracle’s cross-system, global management, and monitoring tool. With Oracle EM plug-ins for engineered systems, Oracle FS1, and Oracle ZFS Storage, users can monitor and manage their entire Oracle environment from application to storage from a single pane of glass. EM plug-ins enable DBAs to monitor and manage storage resources with storage administration involvement.

Oracle Storage Archive Manager and Long-term Archiving 

Oracle StorageTek Storage Archive Manager (SAM) enables policy-based archiving and classification and provides ready access to data throughout its life cycle. 

Source: Oracle.com

How HTTPS Bicycle Attack Works

It is usually assumed that HTTP traffic encapsulated in TLS doesn’t reveal the exact sizes of its parts, such as the length of a Cookie header, or the payload of a HTTP POST request that may contain variable-length credentials such as passwords.

The Bicycle attack, in the context of obtaining the length of a user's password from a browser request, is fairly simple. All a user needs to do is have a packet capture of requests to a known site, including an authentication (login) request containing an already known username and an unknown plain-text password. If an attacker can determine the user's browser and how that browser would send requests to the site, they can subtract the length of all the known data the browser would send except for the piece of information they are interested in, which will result in them knowing the length of the unknown data.

Summary:

• Obtain a packet capture (i.e. via a Man-in-the-Middle attack) which has stream-cipher TLS traffic of encrypted browser requests to a known website, including one where there was likely to be a password sent in an authentication request. The target site may be revealed in the packet capture in the form of a DNS request, or the attacker may be able to find this out with some reconnaissance.
• Obtain a "User-Agent" string from the packet capture or determine which browser the target was using.
• Replicate browser requests to the site using the same browser. This will reveal the lengths of the requests to various pages on the site.
• From the encrypted TLS payloads of the browser requests in the packet capture, extract the lengths of the payloads.
• Compare the Pearson correlation coefficient for the plain-text and encrypted requests. This will enable to compare plain-text and encrypted request lengths in order to reveal which encrypted TLS requests are for which pages (URLs) of the website.

source: eccouncil.org

Five Phases Hacker Must Follow

Phase 1—Reconnaissance 
Reconnaissance refers to the preparatory phase where an attacker gathers as much information as possible about the target prior to launching the attack. Also in this phase, the attacker draws on competitive intelligence to learn more about the target. This phase may also involve network scanning, either external or internal, without authorization.

Phase 2 - Scanning
Scanning is the method an attacker performs prior to attacking the network. In scanning, the attacker uses the details gathered during reconnaissance to identify specific vulnerabilities. Scanning can be considered a logical extension (and overlap) of the active reconnaissance.

Phase 3 - Gaining Access 
Gaining access is the most important phase of an attack in terms of potential damage. Attackers need not always gain access to the system to cause damage. For instance, denial-of-service attacks can either exhaust resources or stop services from running on the target system.

Phase 4 - Maintaining Access
Once an attacker gains access to the target system, the attacker can choose to use both the system and its resources, and further use the system as a launch pad to scan and exploit other systems, or to keep a low profile and continue exploiting the system. Both these actions can damage the organization. For instance, the attacker can implement a sniffer to capture all network traffic, including telnet and ftp sessions with other systems.

Phase 5 - Covering Tracks 

This usually starts with erasing the contaminated logins and any possible error messages that may have been generated from the attack process, e.g., a buffer overflow attack will usually leave a message in the system logs. Next, the attention is turned to effecting changes so that future logins are not logged. By manipulating and tweaking the event logs, the system administrator can be convinced that the output of his/her system is correct, and that no intrusion or compromise has actually taken place.