Conclusion

We believe that the best way to secure a system is to understand how to attack it. This concept, while controversial at first sight, has a long history in the field of cryptography and in the broader network security field. Cryptographic systems are generally not considered "secure" until they have been subjected to some degree of public scrutiny over an extended period of time. We see no reason why software in general should not be subject to the same level of scrutiny. Dan Farmer and Wietse Venema's influential 1994 paper "Improving the Security of Your Site by Breaking into It" neatly makes the argument in favor of understanding attack techniques to better defend your network.

This book is largely composed of a lot of very specific details about the security features and flaws in a number of databases, but you should notice common threads running through the text. We hope that by the end of the book you will have a much better understanding of how to attack the seven databases we address directly here, but also a deeper understanding of how to attack databases in general. With luck, this will translate into databases that are configured, maintained, and audited by people who are far more skilled than the people who attack them.

source :

The Database Hacker's Handbook: Defending Database Servers

by David Litchfield et al.

John Wiley & Sons © 2005