#Security

Wanna Cry

Most of you should be aware that the Wanna Cry virus is massively infecting un-patched windows machines all around the world. It's particularly affecting the NHS, one of my main clients.

Wanna Cry is one of a line of Viruses that exploit SMBv1 over ports 135 and 445.

A kill switch has been enabled, but this won't protect machines sitting behind http proxies, and there are already reports of new versions without a kill switch.

All windows machines should be isolated and updated a.s.a.p.

Created by Daniel Kutac, Sales Engineer, InterSystems

Part 3. Appendix

InterSystems IRIS OAUTH classes explained

In the previous part of our series we have learned about configuring InterSystems IRIS to act as an OAUTH client as well as authorization and authentication server (by means of OpenID Connect). In this final part of our series we are going to describe classes implementing InterSystems IRIS OAuth 2.0 framework. We will also discuss use cases for selected methods of API classes.

The API classes implementing OAuth 2.0 can be separated into three different groups according to their purpose. All classes are implemented in %SYS namespace. Some of them are public (via % package), some not and should not be called by developers directly.

The recent announcement of a collision for the SHA-1 hash algorithm has caused some consternation:

https://shattered.io/

Here is some background to help put this in perspective.

Cryptographic hash functions can have a variety of properties. The property at issue here is:

"Collision resistance - it is computationally infeasible to find any two distinct inputs x, x' which hash to the same output, i.e., such that h(x) = h(x')."

(Menezes, van Oorchot, and Vanstone, "Handbook of Applied Cryptography", section 9.2.2)

When using Studio, ODBC or a terminal connection to Caché or Ensemble, you may have wondered how to secure the connection. One option is to add TLS (aka SSL) to your connection. The Caché client applications - TELNET, ODBC and Studio - all understand how to add TLS to the connection. They just need to be configured to do it.

Configuring these clients is easier in 2015.1 and later. I'm going to be discussing this new method. If you're already using the old, legacy method, it will continue to work, but I would recommend you consider switching to the new one.

This post is meant to provide a quick possible explanation for a very perplexing problem.

Scenario: You’ve just created your own administrative user in your 2014.1 (or later) instance of Caché. You gave it every possible security role (including %All), so it should in theory be able to do anything within the instance.

You’ve written a very advanced routine with a break command in it for debugging:

Question:

What version of Caché supports TLS v1.2?

Answer:

Caché 2015.2 announced support for TLS v1.1 and v1.2. In this version, the SSL/TLS configuration page provides checkboxes for TLS v1.1 and v1.2, which allows the versions to be configured individually. This allows sites to, for example, require TLS v1.2 only.

Additionally, some earlier versions of Caché provide undocumented support for TLS v1.1 and v1.2, specifically Caché 2014.1.3 and above and 2015.1, on Windows, Linux and Unix.

This article, and following two articles of the series, is intended as a user guide for developers or system administrators, who need to work with OAuth 2.0 framework (further referred to as OAUTH for simplicity) in their InterSystems product based applications.

Presenter: Andreas Dieckow
Task: Apply SQL security to multiple servers in a distributed system
Approach: Provide code samples for using new API calls to apply SQL security statements to multiple instances of our products

Description: The requirement that started at all. See examples on how to use this new feature and integrate it into your application by discuss code examples.

Problem: SQL Security is local to the instance and most of time driven by customer application code. That it is only local to the instance and is not automatically going to other instances requires a solution.

Solution: With application code use new API calls to issue SQL security statements that is applied to multiple instances.

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

Presenter: Dan Kutac
Task: Use a common login identity and a central mechanism of authentication across environments from multiple entities
Approach: Provide examples and code samples of an application environment using OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0

Description: In this session we will demonstrate an application environment using OpenID Connect and OAuth 2.0. Hear how this is done and what options you have; and yes, you get to keep the code.

Problem: How to use a a common login identity (e.g. Facebook credentials) and a central mechanism of authorization cross environments from multiple entities.

Solution: Create awareness and interest in using OAuth 2.0

Content related to this session, including slides, video and additional learning content can be found here.

Question:

How can I create, change etc. Security entities (like Users and Roles) programmatically?

Answer:

Using Intel® Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions with InterSystems Caché Substantially Improves Encryption Performance and Reduces Computational Overhead

Executive Summary