Is the Database Vault portion of Audit Vault only for the Audit Vault DB?

Question

Hi all, first of thanks in advance.
I am doing a bit of research in order to fulfill some security system requirements for an upcoming project. In summary the requirement states that DBAs should not have the ability to view personal health information stored in the database.
My initial thought was to use Oracle Label Security but recall that SYS is exempt from the OLS policies. Next I looked into Oracle Database Vault and the product appears to meet the requirements. However another part of the requirement states that we must prevent undetectable data tampering - which to me sounds like we need to have an auditing product in place not only to audit access and data changes but also to make sure that audit logs can't be tampered with. It seems like Oracle Audit Vault should meet the requirement. When looking into Audit Vault it mentions it comes with Oracle Database Vault and there is some wording which makes me believe that the Oracle Database Vault component is only for the Audit Vault database. Short of installing the product I thought I would post a message to see if my assumption is correct.
If the assumption is correct it sounds like we would need to purchase both Audit Vault and Database Vault to fully meet the requirement. Can anyone think of any reason we need to include OLS as well?
Once again, thanks in advance.
Cheers,
Eric

Answer 1

I imagine you are dealing with the HIPAA compliance requirements and facing the same issue faced by many others.
To audit who has viewed data ... SELECT statements ... you can use Fine Grained Auditing (FGA).
To meet the government's auditing requirements, as well as those for hospital accreditation Audit Vault will do the trick.
Keeping DBAs out of the data can be done by a number of means but the issue often comes down to the applications you have purchased and the quality of the vendors. One major source of hospital software in the US, for example, has installed thousands of systems with the exact same password for the schema owner ... and that schema owner has DBA privs.
So before your run too far down the road of closing the back door ... make sure the front door isn't wide open.