Infrastructure Information Security

 This article will discuss some internals of the Oracle Network Encryption. Generally, there are two ways how you can protect the transmission of the data between application server and the Oracle DB. One way is to deploy TLS, certificate based wrapper around communication channel. This method will not be discussed here. Another way is to deploy Oracle Network Encryption and is the subject of this discussion. When I first tried to evaluate Oracle Network Encryption I did not know the details of protection mechanism - I knew it encrypted DB traffic, that was all. Once the Network Encryption was setup with the server and client (application server), the next step was to run network sniffer and verify the encryption was taking place. Oracle documentation describes how you configure either thick client (Oracle dedicated DB client such as sqlplus) or thin client (jdbc client, which was our case here). Essentially, one needs to configure sqlnet.ora on the server side and sqlnet.ora on th...