Firebird News

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Those features are based on earlier work of the Firebird project (some
of the code was published earlier with Fyracle, for example).

The engine supports operation in multi-threaded “SuperClassic” mode –
the code is now closely aligned with Firebird HEAD so we QA the same
thing and share the experience.

But the very main focus of this release was on security functions. This
presentation made at the last Firebird conference outlines the changes:
http://www.red-soft.biz/files/downloads/files/security_regulations.ppt

The changes include:

Integrated cryptography
– Cryptographic subsystem
– WinCrypt-based crypto plug-in

Comprehensive Role-based Access Control mechanism
– Cumulative roles model (RBAC)
– Pre-defined default roles
– Global roles (that is, roles whose permissions apply to system, not a particular database)
– fine-grained DML access control (sequence priveleges added, etc)
– fine-grained DDL access control
– The system catalog filtering (based on row-level security)
– Access control for Services (e.g. backup)

Authentication improvements
– Support for multi-factor authentication (password-based, certificates, biometric – e.g. retina, etc)
– Access policies (password quality, auth factors required, etc)

Security breach detection, incident analysis tools
– The tests framework for the security subsystem (for breach detection)
– Detailed security event logging subsystem (can log each SQL, BLR or DYN query, for example)
– Security log analysis feature (the ability to query external security logs as SQL tables)
– Digital signature checking for server binaries
– Digital signature checking for critical data and metadata

General security features
– Secure Memory Deallocation (RAM and on-disk)
– LSB Linux builds (to align with certified crypto engines)
– Permissions checking for blobs

Engine source code is included inside the packages, new modules are IDPL. English-version packages have very permissive Mozilla-style EULA.

Please note that this is a beta quality release, for testing only. It
has about 25 known issues related to new functionality, but we developed
500+ new QMDB tests, so some of the new features seem to work. 🙂

Thanks,
Nikolay Samofatov

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