Darren Duncan wrote:
A practice I like that I've seen done for a federal-government scale database program is to have each person using the application to login to the database using their own temporary database user. How it works is that the database has a users table similar to as if the application was managing users itself, and when the person logs in they are using credentials defined in that table. What actually happens for login is that there is a special database user which only has privileges to execute a single stored procedure, and the application's login screen talks to the database with that special user and invokes the procedure, giving the person-provided user and pass as procedure arguments. The stored procedure checks the database table, and if the credentials are accepted, the procedure then generates a new database user and password and gives these back to the application, which then turns around and logs in as the temporary user in order to do all the normal work of the person. This generated user only has the privileges that the person needs. This approach seems to have security benefits of some kinds. -- Darren Duncan
I should also clarify that this was a decade ago and the context was a desktop application which maintained an open connection for the person's work day. Although I think the same technique was also used there for web applications afterwards, that used the same database, if I don't mis-remember. I believe this was an Oracle 8 DBMS. -- Darren Duncan
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