What This Book Covers

The majority of this book is concerned with specific details of individual, practical security problems in seven popular database systems (Oracle, DB2, Informix, Sybase ASE, MySQL, SQL Server, and PostgreSQL). We discuss the mechanisms behind these problems and provide some analysis of how these issues can be addressed, with specific workarounds and more general configuration guidelines. The security landscape is constantly shifting and much of the material in this volume is very specific to individual bugs , but the conclusions and discussion of generalized classes of security vulnerability will remain relevant for many years to come.

In the discussion we try to highlight the types of problems that modern database systems are vulnerable to and to provide readers with a perspective that should help them to defend against these classes of problem.