At Oracle OpenWorld, F5 Networks showcased its integrated solution for Oracle Database Firewall that provides enhanced security for web-based database applications. F5’s solution integrates F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager (LTM) and BIG-IP Application Security Manager (ASM) with Oracle Database Firewall to protect against SQL injection attacks and provide richer forensic information about these threats.
“We are focused on helping customers get the most out of their investment in Oracle. We help assure that customers’ Oracle technologies run very fast, are always highly available, and their transactions are secure,” Ron Carovano, F5 manager for business development, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
“Our web application firewall Big IP Application Security Manager is a web application firewall that sits at the web tier and it can prevent a lot of threats. When we detect SQL injection, we don’t block it; we collect all the user metadata and ship that information to the database firewall via sys log. Then, the database firewall, in turn, when it sees that attack, will block it, but it will also correlate that attack with the user metadata so now you have a very rich set of forensic information about the attack. Not only have you blocked it but you can take some prospective action based on understanding what part of the application was vulnerable, where the attack came from and those sorts of things,” explains Carovano.
That solution has been available for a couple of years, but was recently updated, Carovano explains.
“In the past, the Oracle Database Firewall could be run in active standby mode so all the traffic would go to one but if there was a failure situation, it would failover to the standby, but now with BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager, we can load balance multiple Oracle Database Firewalls in an active-active configuration so the new twist is that not only do we have the unified forensic information but we also enable higher performance deployments with this high availability architecture,” says Carovano. “The result is that if you have lots of database traffic that needs to be protected, you can stand up lots of Oracle Database Firewalls and load balance them with Big IP. We help monitor the databases and then we distribute the traffic accordingly.”
More information is available about Oracle Database Firewall.
For more information about F5, go to www.f5networks.com