What's new in Oracle Database 20c Security?

A cloud preview of Oracle Database 20c was recently released and your documentation is also available.

Oracle Database 20c Documentation.

As usual, many changes are introduced (new features incorporated, behavior changes, deprecated and desupported Features, etc.)

Regarding to database security features, the most relevant things are:

Behavior Changes, Deprecated and Desupported Features:

It is important to take a look at these sections of the 20c documentation, to ensure that none of the security features we are using are affected.

Behavior Changes for Oracle Database 20c Upgrade Planning

• About Read-Only Oracle Homes

Deprecated Features in Oracle Database 20c

• Deprecation of Traditional Auditing
• Deprecation of Older Algorithms in DBMS_CRYPTO
• Deprecation of Enterprise User Security (EUS) User Migration Utility
• Deprecation of TLS 1.0 (Transport Layer Security

Desupported Features in Oracle Database 20c

• Desupport of DBMS_OBFUSCATION_TOOLKIT Package
• Desupport of DBMS_CRYPTO_TOOLKIT_TYPES and DBMS_CRYPTO_TOOLKIT
• Desupport of Oracle ACFS Security (Vault) and ACFS Auditing
• Desupport of ACFS Encryption on Solaris and Windows

Desupported Parameters in Oracle Database 20c

• Desupport of UNIFIED_AUDIT_SGA_QUEUE_SIZE
• Desupport of IGNORECASE Parameter for Passwords

New Features:

General Security

• Force Upgraded Password File to be Case Sensitive
• Connect to Multiple Databases with Different Certificates from a single client
• Ability to Specify the Location of the CMU Wallet and dsi.ora File with a Database Property
• Addition of USER_APPLICATION_ROLES Data Dictionary View
• Predefined Unified Audit Policies for Security Technical Implementation Guides (STIG) Compliance
• SYSLOG Destination for Common Unified Audit Policies
• Unified Audit Policies Enforced on the Current User
• Unified Audit Policy Configuration Changes Effective Immediately
• Auditing for Oracle XML DB HTTP and FTP Services
• Oracle Blockchain Table
• Enterprise User Manager Support for Per-PDB Directory Service Connections

Advanced Security

• Ability to Set the Default Tablespace Encryption Algorithm
• Improved Performance for Wallets with Large Numbers of TDE Keys in Wallets and Oracle Key Vault
• Enhanced Database Availability with Zero Downtime to Switch Over to an Updated PKCS#11 Library

In future posts, I will expand on about each change.